


a hundred years of summer

by plutonicfriend



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pining, Sort Of, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 06:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18614584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutonicfriend/pseuds/plutonicfriend
Summary: Wonwoo turns his head to face him with a smirk.“Are you accusing Junhui and Jihoon of stealing your dream anime protagonist spotlight?”Mingyu stops and scowls, “Not when you put it that way.”-Or, between the hills and the forests and their lonely neighbourhood, Mingyu and Wonwoo grow up together.





	a hundred years of summer

If he were to look back on it all, this is what Mingyu would remember: 

A call from Junhui on the first day, Jihoon texting on the second, and Wonwoo climbing over the fence, stepping around the daffodils, and marching right over to his back door on the third. 

“Did you hear?”

It’s telling that Wonwoo doesn’t bother to throw a stink-eye at Mingyu who’s still in his pajamas, answering the door with hands shoved into giant red oven mitts.  

“Did I hear your giant feet stomping its way over the yard? Yes, yes I did.”

Wonwoo shoulders his way in and, bless his heart, flicks him on the cheek as he enters. A puff of flour springs out from the point of impact. He's gotten brazen since Mingyu began accelerating past him in the height department, and if it wasn’t for the reason that Mingyu is a giant saint with a golden heart, he could topple Wonwoo over like a toothpick bowling pin. 

A goddamn saint.  

“You know what I mean,” Wonwoo stresses. 

Mingyu rubs his cheek through the mitt, “ _ Ow.  _ And yes, of course I’ve heard, no one’s really been shutting up about it.”

Slipping on his designated Wonwoo-only slippers — the yellow ones with tiny flowers — Wonwoo heads right to the oven. Its orange glow basks his face as he crouches before it, arms crossed atop his knees and making him look like a house friendly gargoyle. 

Mingyu can sense a storm when its coming. 

“Wanna guess who I heard it from?” Wonwoo asks. 

Knowing everyone, and Mingyu means everyone, the only person forgetful enough to  _ not _ tell Wonwoo would be Hansol. Which is unfortunate, because it’s close to impossible to even approach being mad at him. 

“Hansol!” Wonwoo raises his arms, “The closest he’s ever been to Jihoon was when he sat on his headphones. He’s never even  _ spoken  _ to Junhui before.”

Mingyu walks over and crouches beside him, bumps their shoulders together. When antsy, Wonwoo doesn’t do so well with all the touchy-feely goodness Mingyu usually to get away with, but through years of working out the kinks, he’s figured out the essential steps to getting Wonwoo to calm down. 

Step one: tell the truth, but with a fistful of sugar. 

“We didn’t really bring it up with you because, well…”

“If you say sensitive, those cookies won’t be the only thing in the oven.”

Mingyu snorts and throws his arm around his shoulder, shaking in some lassez-faire, cookie baking, good Sunday vibes that Wonwoo seriously needs. Wonwoo tries to shrug him off. Mingyu shakes harder.

“What I  _ meant _ was that we all know how you feel about soulmates and shit, so we figured whether you knew now or later wouldn’t…” he grits his teeth for the goldilock words, “change your reaction?”

Wonwoo slumps forward. 

“Okay, fair. I guess I’ve got a reputation for shit talking.”

Mingyu laughs. A seventy slide powerpoint as his end of year research presentation did make a bit of a reputation, yes. 

“Oh, come on, I wouldn’t say shit talking. More like, aggressive, robust critiques—“

Wonwoo pushes his arm off, “You can stop trying to comfort me now.”

Mingyu grins, dropping to his butt and pulling Wonwoo down with him. He throws a leg over his calf and presses down, squeezing a smile out of his friend’s lips. “It’s nice to see you being a drama queen sometimes.”

Wonwoo huffs, “I really felt for a moment that Junhui and Jihoon went off and eloped without telling me.”

“Nah,” the sudden thought of Jihoon in a tuxedo sort of makes Mingyu want to die, “those two haven’t really been talking anyway.”

“Oh?” 

Now that makes Wonwoo perk up. Mingyu ignores the less-than-despondent tilt to his voice. 

“I don't think they've told anyone what  _ really  _ happened. Something must have changed between them for their marks to just appear at the same time, yeah?”

There's no response to that, not verbally at least. Wonwoo just hums in that non-committal way he does when he's trying to act unphased, lips pursed, chin tilted to the side, a sudden interest in the floor.

“Not like anyone knows why marks appear, though,” Mingyu continues, mumbling, “you wanna go to the park later?” 

“Doesn't matter if something happened before their marks, things are definitely all messed up between them now.”

A frown pinches Mingyu's lips, “Come on, you don't mean that.” 

“Some drawings on your body is hardly a guarantee of anything.” 

“It's a guarantee there's a connection. Fate. The same coincidence billions of times isn't a coincidence.” 

Wonwoo shrugs, “You know what I mean, Gyu.” 

He does know what he means. Wonwoo’s the sole person he's ever known to be so vehemently against the idea of being fated to someone, the word itself lights him up like a match; bright, fiery and short-lived, with a lingering wake of something burnt. Mingyu's more or less the rehearsal puppet to every rant and he’s got the points skewered into his brain.

It's stupid. It's sappy. It's an entire culmination of over-romanticised ideals of an unexplained phenomenon that has yielded zero logical and falsifiable explanations in all recorded history. The greatest source of romantic comedy plotlines. Cheese fodder. 

But Mingyu also knows what he really means. At least what he thinks it really means. 

That Wonwoo doesn't want to deal with it, can't blindly take for granted this mysterious, blind blessing until someone publishes a peer-reviewed paper of it. And then has the results repeated. And repeated. Until Wonwoo himself repeats it.

It's funny. After all these years at the short end of this stick, Mingyu would expect himself to also turn sour to soulmates, but he's actually grossest romantic of them all. Figures. Mingyu guesses if he believes in soulmates, he ought to believe in a universal balance. Yin-Yang. Karma. Santa Claus vs. Satan.

In the end, they're both stubborn in a way. Wonwoo's never liked confrontation, especially against himself, and Mingyu's never liked confronting Wonwoo, even if it meant doing it to himself. He wonders how Wonwoo hasn't figured it out yet with how obvious he’s being. 

“I know what you mean,” he accepts gently. He throws his arm around Wonwoo’s shoulder again, squeezes him this time, “Park?” 

Wonwoo snorts, rolls his eyes, smiles. He doesn't push him away. The oven dings. 

Step two: have cookies prepared beforehand. 

“Yeah. Park it is.”

  
  


At the heart of it all, Mingyu thinks he’s got it pretty laid out.  

At 17, he swears he’s not that young anymore despite the tendency for his mom to point it out. But he thinks he's got most things covered. 

The world is small. Contained in a lower upper-middle suburb, three blocks away from school, two streets from the minimart, one street from the park, and zero houses between him and Jeon Wonwoo. Full-time best friend, part-time annoying growth on his side. 

He’s a little too tall and a little too loud, but the neighbourhood grandmothers find him sweet and the kids think he’s a riot. His parents dote him and he dotes his sister. Friendships branch out into a coral reef, colourful, expansive, with a little bit for everyone so that, not to grow his own head, he’s not that far down the food chain.

He is liked and loved and wanted by the people he likes, loves and wants. At least, that's what's he's betting on. Hoping for, in that insecure pubescent way. 

But there’s always that question for more. 

  
  


Of all the special places in Mingyu's heart — his bed, the kitchen, the rooftop balcony that he snuck up to and got locked out for the whole third period — the reserve is his favourite. It's his and Wonwoo's favourite, actually. They've grown in this neighbourhood for so long the woods have extended into their own yards.  

There’s the park area. The playground, the picnic tables and the walking track, but once around the wide girth of the lake and deeper into the neck of the woodlands, where the hiking path fragments into gravel, the world declines into a forest-like dream. There isn't much in their town in terms of cinemas and cafes, with the nearest shopping mall almost an hour's walk, the train lines all regional and the parking lots all small, but their home is dense with towering trees, cool, rushing creeks and rustling birds, a mountain range that bulges into view just beyond the steepest hill.  

It's easy to get lost here, both in body and thought. Sometimes Mingyu comes here alone, but most of the time he doesn’t.

Once their tracks disappear off the gravel, Wonwoo leads. They climb their way up a ladder of collapsed boulders resting against a ledge and Mingyu watches from behind the way Wonwoo begins to lax. His shoulders drop. His lips soften. His bright gaze always turns milky once beneath the foliage and it’s as if watching him pass through a mirror to another side of him. 

He's always been like that. Spacey. 

But it’s easy to guess why. It’s harder to genuinely call things magical the older one gets but Mingyu couldn’t conjure up a better word even if he wanted to. Silence gusts over the forest floor. There’s always the scamper of something underfoot, a loose tune whistling through the leaves and Mingyu swears he sometimes hears the chiming of bells, ghosting by his ears. 

“You know how, like, in movies and tv shows, they make high school look real hip and shit?”

Wonwoo, already pulling himself up onto the ledge, snorts. 

“Yeah, real hip. Real shit.”

“And there’s always like those background people who don’t do anything but walk down the hallway or eat lunch?”

Wonwoo hums in acknowledgment. Once he’s close, Wonwoo grips Mingyu’s wrist and helps him up to his feet. They continue to walk.

“Do you ever think about them? The background people?”

“The entire purpose of background people is to have them unnoticeable. What’s your point?”

Mingyu gnaws on his thoughts, “Sometimes when all the bad shit is going down to the main characters, I kind of just look at the supporting cast and think, man I’d rather be them. Except in zombie movies. Supporting cast always die.”

Wonwoo turns his head to face him with a smirk.

“Are you accusing Junhui and Jihoon of stealing your dream anime protagonist spotlight?”

Mingyu stops and scowls, “Not when you put it that way.”

Wonwoo’s grin is pearly white, “They’re not the first teenagers in the world to find out.”

“Yeah, but...” in two strides, Mingyu catches up to his side, “it’s still insanely uncommon. And it happened to  _ our  _ friends, in  _ this  _ town.”

Wonwoo replies with the raise of one brow, which pulls a sigh out of Mingyu’s lips. 

“For a second,  _ please,  _ pretend you care about being fated and humour me about how life-changing it is.”

“It’s  _ only  _ life changing because everyone is making a big deal out of it,” without a break in rhythm, Wonwoo steps over and slides down a steep decline, not a glance back at Mingyu as he follows. He doesn’t sound angry, his voice is smooth and iced over, as if skating through practiced lines, “Instead of Jihoon and Junhui, they’re now going to lumped together — JihoonandJunhui — for the rest of their life by everyone they know, from a bunch of squiggles on their skin.”

They hit flat ground again, grass and soil digging against their shoes and Wonwoo bulldozes ahead over the shrubs, the moss, across Mingyu’s shadow and towards the creek bank. 

“It would be nice if people stopped thinking that once your marks appeared, their lives would become whatever’s lying beyond a sunset,” Wonwoo continues, growing frustrated, “There’s still pain, there’s still anger and anxiety and pain in the asses. The exact same shit you deal with before it all.”

Wonwoo stops when he reaches the water, a heavy sigh escaping his chest and a part of Mingyu feels bad for poking sleeping lions again, but another part of him is just sad. Or selfish. 

“But at least you won’t be alone,” Mingyu murmurs when his own path stops at the water.

Wonwoo scoffs, kicks a pebble into the currents, “That’s too simple,” he says. 

_ I could say the same for you,  _ Mingyu thinks.

Instead, he says, “It’s good to take things easier.”

“Good doesn’t mean easy or right,” finally looking at him, Wonwoo smiles weakly, maybe even apologetically, “You know how I feel.”

“Yeah,” Mingyu laughs, “but I’m still as stubborn as you are about this.”

“Which I will never understand.”

“If you had a single sentimental bone in your body—” Wonwoo immediately pulls a face which Mingyu ignores, “-- you would appreciate all the good it has brought.”

“I’m sure good things would still be happening without matching magic tattoos.”

Mingyu exhales through his nose, “I would love to banter, but I’m afraid I haven’t bought any camping gear with me for an overnight stay.”

In another universe, Wonwoo might sock him, but because Mingyu’s an untouchable saint, he gets a playful punch in the arm instead. 

“You want to stay over tonight? At my place, I mean,” he asks, “It's my turn to make dessert.” 

Mingyu moves to sit down, crossing his legs and tugging Wonwoo’s shirt to get him to do the same. 

The answer’s a definite yes. Has always been, will always be, but Wonwoo’s never given a straightforward answer in his life, “What are you making?” 

“Whatever you want,” he grins. 

Wonwoo rolls his eyes, gives him an elbow, but his unfading smile speaks for itself.  

It's bright still but the sun’s already freckled behind the treetops, vivid as a molten cherry and melting the sky pink. It's quiet. Cool, with winds still and water lulled. That chiming noise sings a little louder in Mingyu’s ears. 

He feels Wonwoo shiver, the gentle press of his arm into his side. It makes his heart ache a little. 

He used to give his parents heart attacks when he snuck out here during the nighttime, drawn in by some force he was too weak to ignore. 

He’d always have to drag a reluctant Wonwoo with him back then, armed with a flashlight and a box of bandaids because Wonwoo’s always had something against the dark and Mingyu’s always had something against gravity. 

The thing is, Wonwoo talks shit but he goes through with it all. If Mingyu wants to do something, whether it’s the skateboard park in a 34 celsius melt, or thinking that climbing the massive oak by the reserve is fantastic idea, Wonwoo always, always follows. 

It's how Mingyu broke his arm in the seventh grade. The break line in his bone has become some silly proof to him that he and Wonwoo belong at each other's sides. 

Maybe not MingyuandWonwoo, but something close enough. Something. 

 

+

 

When Mingyu asks what Wonwoo’s earliest memory of him is, he replies rather humourlessly, “Kindergarten, when you cried because I took your favourite lego piece.” And that was that.  

Wonwoo himself never asks that question. Mingyu’s not sure why, probably because he knows he’d lie and tell him it was something equally embarrassing, like the unfortunate de-pantsing of second grade, the big blood nose of third-grade soccer, or the time he swallowed a grasshopper and bawled because after the first murder it’s all just downhill from there. 

But the truth is, Mingyu isn’t even that sure of his first  _ first  _ memory of Wonwoo. 

They’ve known about each other for their whole lives but only became friends during fourth grade camp when the elusive boy-next-door squared up and told Mingyu to, and he quotes, shut the _heck_ up.

Okay. Maybe the real truth is, Mingyu isn’t sure  _ what  _ his first memory is.

It’s the kind of recall that hurts his brain. Like the jumbled pronumerals of an equation or him trying to visualize exactly what was on his notes during an exam.

Wonwoo holding his hand, shaking like a leaf, and the sky overcast in grey. A massive shadow looming overhead. 

Whatever that was, and whatever those fragments meant, if he ever could tell, he can’t anymore.

 

+

 

Wonwoo hums absentmindedly, the breeze from the window tickling the hairs on his nape.

After so many years not even Mingyu’s mom would take note of his presence in the household. It’s become transactional, one son shifting from one home to the other with always a spare pillow, a spare towel, a spare seat at the dining table ready. 

Toothbrush in mouth, Mingyu sits cross-legged next to him.

Too lazy to cross the yard over to his own home, he’s picked out some old clothes from the depth of Mingyu’s drawers to wear. It’s the same old shorts and thrifted band tee usually. The cotton grows thinner with each passing year and the graphic’s so faded neither of them remember what it used to say. It’s loose and boxy on his frame. The only thing that ever begun to fill out are the shoulders. 

His glasses sit low on his nose, the paperback forgotten in his hands as he’s just staring at the ceiling, engrossed. Mingyu doesn’t ever really know what goes in his brain half the time. 

“Watcha thinkin’ ‘bout?” he mumbles around his toothbrush.

“That’s gross.”

“You’ve seen worse,” he wiggles his brows. 

Wonwoo closes his book, nose scrunched up and caught between a sneer and a smile, “Unfortunately.”

A small lapse of silence. The light in the room needs to be changed, its glow is dim and the shadows it casts are stretched and fringed on the walls. 

“Seriously though, what’re starin’ off ‘bout?” Mingyu struggles to keep the contents of his mouth in.

The duvet gets yanked away from his splash zone, “Spit that out before you spit on me.”

Mingyu grins, minty fresh, and slowly leans in closer. Wonwoo kicks him on the thigh. Mingyu giggles and retaliates, hooking Wonwoo’s arm and dropping his full weight on his stomach, pressing him down to the mattress. Wonwoo cries in protest, laughing and trying to roll away, before kneeing him straight in the chest.

Wonwoo, unassumingly thin and willowy, has knives for joints.

“‘Kay, ‘kay! ‘M out!” Mingyu rolls off, sternum clutched to like a stab wound.

Wonwoo kicks him in the butt as he walks out.

By the time his mouth is no longer minty-fresh and they’ve established an anti-wrestling trust policy, the lights are off and the moon is out, and Mingyu can’t find it in him to sleep. 

It’s hard to with the way his brain can’t stop running. On shared nights like this, it’s usually guilt that keeps him awake. 

There are glow-in-the-dark star stickers stuck on the ceiling, from way back when Wonwoo sleeping in the same bed as him wasn’t that much of brow-quirker, and the older was insistent that space was cool and Mingyu’s room was boring. Nowadays their light has faded to near nonexistence. 

“I should take those off,” he mumbles. Beside him, Wonwoo stirs. 

For as long as he’s known, Wonwoo’s always been a terrible sleeper and Mingyu can’t recall the last time Wonwoo fell asleep before he did. It might be some kind of insomnia, he’s not sure, but he doesn’t want to sound like the wheedling worrier he is. 

“Should I take those stars off?” he repeats, hushed. 

Wonwoo gently kicks the duvet off of the two of them, their shared body heat too much. 

“No.”

“No?” Mingyu tilts his head to look at him. They have their own pillows, Mingyu’s a faded blue, Wonwoo’s a clashing floral vomit from the recesses of the linen closet. 

“We should get new ones instead.”

Mingyu kicks his legs into the air, “Shopping trip!” and Wonwoo laughs. 

It's a nice sound. Deep and breathless, he feels it like an echo would in a cavern, lingering in the ear and the heart. 

He likes the way Wonwoo’s shoulders hunch up, how even though they're lying down, his head still tries to throw itself back, and that nose crinkle. He really likes that nose crinkle. 

The thing is, what Mingyu can only admit under the haze of nighttime, is that he wouldn’t mind if Wonwoo was his fated. His soulmate. Wouldn’t mind for one moment if it was him, and only him, he was connected to. 

It’s like this, knees and ankles knocked together, grinning at faded stickers, both boys too tall, too gangly and outgrown but still making do. It’s so simple, it feels so perfect to Mingyu and it makes him ache with guilt to both think this and to think anything otherwise. 

He won’t mind. He promises himself this, he won’t mind either outcome.

He won't, he won't, he won't. 

Eventually, his eyes start to slip close, the mantra slurring as things began fade into the barest blurs of sensation. 

On a cool dark night like this, he feels okay. Can feel the dip in weight of Wonwoo’s arm splayed out on his pillow, the residual heat of his body. Can feel his fingers curling to poke him in the stomach a wordless  _ goodnight.  _

His eyes fall closed. He feels okay.

 

+

 

In the abridged version, here’s how it works. Sort of. 

Higher dimensions of reality and speculative pseudoscience and all those other throw-around words aside, no one can exactly explain the whole big, fat deal about soulmates. 

They, the scientists, the philosophers, the telescope wielders, those proverbial cats who get killed, have thought of it all. The biology, the physics, the stars and gods and ghosts. 

Neurological links and receptive bioelectricity, the act of some heaven or some ancient mythology, maybe fate’s red string knotted like a shoelace around the ankle up into the bloodstream of the heart. Maybe aliens. Maybe a simulator.

A lot of them fall out of fashion, and a lot of them fall in. 

If you’re lucky enough, Mingyu has been told over again and again, you’ll find that someone who, when the time is right, will inscribe their mark right into his skin, right into his bone. A mark on the soul, fleshed out onto the body. 

There are the disbelievers. Maybe this was humanity’s five thousand year fever dream burning inside every one of them. But call him a romantic or call him commonplace, Mingyu doesn’t think a love like that could be hallucinatory. Doesn’t think that something so raw, so right, couldn’t not exist.

Then again, what does he know?

 

+

 

“Since when did you have a  _ cat _ ?”

There’s an animal present. An animal so incredibly present and out of place Mingyu contemplates if the simulator had an upgrade whilst he was asleep, Companion Animal package now installed. This cat, this black-furred, yellow-eyed thing squints at him. As if capable of  _ indignancy  _ or something. 

Wonwoo lets himself in, waving Mingyu to stop blocking the doorway to let his new cat follow close behind like some sort of parasite. Or plague. Or plague carrying parasite. 

Yeah, Mingyu's not too fond of cats.

“Since about 48 hours ago,” Wonwoo informs.

“Did it just start following you home or something? Is it  _ diseased _ ?”

Unimpressed —  what the fuck, it’s responding — the cat hisses at him and Mingyu cannot believe this, cannot believe Wonwoo is looking amused by this. 

He bends down, picks up the thing and cradles it in his arms, running his fingers down along its spine. Its coat ripples beneath the ministration, fur shifting with the morning light as it melts to the touch, tail swishing at Mingyu as if to gloat. 

Oh no. Mingyu recognises the look on Wonwoo’s face. That greasy doe-eyed look that screams of fondness from every angle, from his gentle stroking and hunched shoulders as he coddles the cat close to his chest. This scrawny thing has him smitten. Great. 

He’s being upstaged by a tick-bitten kitten. 

“No, seriously, has it gotten its shots?”

The thing turns to him look at him, one ear flicking. 

Mingyu could incapacitate it just by sitting on it. 

“Don’t be rude,” is all Wonwoo says, favouring his animal over him  _ —  _ him! — before starting to head upstairs to his bedroom, “she’s been very helpful.”

Mingyu almost feels a little bad then. Almost. 

He's a dog person, so sue him. 

His eyes follow the two of them as they make their way up the stairs. Wonwoo doesn’t even spare him a glance. 

“Does it at least have a name?” he calls, still rooted by the shoe cabinets.

Up from the banister, Wonwoo glances down at his cat first before peering down at Mingyu, “Just Cat is good.”

Mingyu snorts, “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Wonwoo!” Mingyu whines, and the only response he gets is Wonwoo’s snicker as he walks away. 

He huffs. Yeah, he’s a brat but he’s getting low-priority treatment here. He hurries up the stairs, two steps at a time just to catch a black tail snaking its way into his room. 

“Does it really have to come in? Can’t we leave it  outside, in the wilderness?”

 

+

 

“Do you have to bring  _ it  _ everywhere?”

Cat swipes at him, claws unsheathed, and Mingyu hiccups on a yelp, the shopping basket in his hand swerving a violent left. 

“Did you see that!?”

Wonwoo hums, eyes glued on the shelves of lamps and plant pots instead of the feral lump of fur resting atop his shoulders. It’s constant presence is beginning to irk him. From the way it slithers along behind Wonwoo’s legs, intertwining between ankles, or how it perches atop his shoulders, peering at Mingyu at equal eye level. 

It’s unnerving as  _ fuck.  _

No matter how much Mingyu points out how weird this fucking cat is, Wonwoo isn’t even entertaining the idea of making his animal appear  _ normal _ .

There are plenty of eyes trained on them, two nefarious adolescents toting around a mangy ancestrally-bubonic animal. God knows how it was even allowed in here. 

“Do you think I should get the cement or the clay?” 

Two small pots, one in each hand, are lifted up to his face. 

Mingyu purses his lips, “One day I’m going to walk into your room and see you growing mushrooms out of your skin among your brethren.”

Wonwoo gives him a look and Mingyu sighs, “I like the clay one.”

Wonwoo’s cat swishes its tail and brings it up to curl against his left forearm, the one connected to his hand holding the cement one. Wonwoo spares her a glance.

“She likes the cement one though.”

Come  _ on. _

This cat’s been here, what, for less than twenty-four hours and Mingyu’s kind of under the assumption he’s being replaced by a four-legged, fur-balled, overgrown  _ rat _ .

“You’re really going to take an animal’s opinion over mine?”

Wonwoo shrugs and puts the clay one back on the shelf. “I think I like the cement one better too.”

Mingyu suppresses a huff, “So damn weird.”

Exasperated, but accustomed, Wonwoo rolls his and grabs Mingyu’s wrist to pull him along to another aisle. “Don’t be jealous that I’m giving attention to someone other than you.”

“That’s a lie and you know it,” This dejection is just a manifestation of how uncomfortable he is. He’s  _ not _ jealous. “That cat should be jealous of me.”

Wonwoo bursts into a laugh. Mingyu lets some of the tension melt out of his face.

“Humour me.” 

Mingyu slips his fingers between Wonwoo’s own and sways their conjoined hands back and forth. His insides turn a little fuzzy when Wonwoo responds with nothing but a brief glance before sending him the tiniest squeeze back, a flicker of a smile. 

“Well, obviously, I’m way more handsome.”

“She’s a cat, Mingyu.”

“And I’m a human. From my perspective, my lack of fur is a defining feature of attractiveness.”

“So then, hypothetically, you’re the world’s ugliest cat?”

Cat meows. 

“She’s agreeing.”

Mingyu scowls, “You’re not even going to vouch for me? I can’t believe your siding with a cat.”

“She’ll grow on you,” There’s a smug purr when Wonwoo reaches up to tickle her beneath her chin, “eventually.”

There’s a retort atop Mingyu’s teeth —  _ over my dead, decomposing flesh bag —  _ as they’re reaching another aisle, when a movement between the shelves captures his eyes. 

Mingyu stills. Wonwoo stumbles backwards, hand slipping from his just as it vanishes. Gone. Nothing. Just elderflower candles and cotton bathroom towels right where he was looking. 

Mingyu blinks, wonders if he even saw anything at all.

“What’s wrong?” Wonwoo’s voice is still, tense with deep concern as his eyes flicker between Mingyu’s face and the space where he was fixating. Cat, too, stills her swaying tail.

“Nothing,” Mingyu says, “just wondering if it’s too early to make my room smell like vanilla pumpkin.”

Wonwoo blinks out of his worried stupor, glancing down at the candles on display. His expression twists into a derisive snort, “Only if you start humming jingles.”

Wonwoo shakes his head, eyebrows quirked in amused angles with a diluted smile stretching his lips, “Come on,” he grabs the hem of his shirt and tugs, “let’s go pay.”

 

+

 

Wonwoo had always been a strange kid. 

Not strange in the manner he was the child at the back of the classroom that ate glue — that was Mingyu — nor did he colour the sky green and dogs blue — that was Mingyu too — but he spent a lot of time staring. At what, not even Mingyu knows. 

The blank blueness of a still sky, the rusting hinge of an old gate, the corner of the school gymnasium. Sometimes, nothing at all. 

He had went to a doctor once, for fear of something diagnosable and he had returned, told to eventually grow out of it. Kids are full of imagination, your son's just a dreamer, you should be glad. 

As a small child, Mingyu was told, Wonwoo would cry for no discernible cause. A sunny day, no clouds, no winds, no burns, and Wonwoo’s eyes would water after a glance at his backyard. It's one of the Jeon family's favourite jests to make at least once during every gathering and it turns Wonwoo's cheeks pink and glues his lips shut until someone asks him to pass the salt.

 

+

 

Bathing beneath the warmth of the late afternoon, Mingyu might feel something akin to hopelessness. Out in the fields of the park, if he closed his eyes he could think they were on some hill or some open plane of gold, reaching out to the very fingertips of the horizon. Sunny and bright with their bodies melting to the dirt. Nothing to worry over, nothing to think.

Clouds migrate above, pearl white and clumpy, heavy with the promise of rain. Maybe a thunderstorm. 

“They all kind of look like mangoes,” he says. 

“Mango.” Wonwoo tests the word on his tongue, rolling it around to taste, “Mango. Mingyu. Mangyu. Mingo. After this we’ll buy some?”

“Yeah, okay,” he mumbles back, voice flat enough to garner a glance at him from Wonwoo.

“What’s wrong?” He turns his head to look at him. The grass obscures half his face away so Mingyu only sees one of his eyes, it’s usual brown illuminated by the sun. 

He turns to look back up at the sky, lets the whole blue scape take over his vision. A breeze stirs his hair and the grass, the light cotton of his shirt. He doesn’t really want to talk about it but it’s also eating him from the inside out like a colony of anxiety-fueled termites for the past hour or so.

“Do you ever think about your soulmate?” 

He doesn't know why he asked that. Since Junhui and Jihoon, the idea has been hanging around his mind. Does Wonwoo ever wonder? Has he ever wondered about them like how Mingyu wonders about his? 

“Not. Not really,” the response is quick and quiet and Mingyu sees Wonwoo shift to look away, his elbows twitching closer to his sides, “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

Wonwoo shrugs rather aggressively. His shoulders drop alongside a frustrated sigh, “It’s so stupid. I don’t know, it's kind of ambiguous and pretentious. Whoever they are, I don't care about them right now. We haven't even met.”

He doesn’t want it to, but it hurts a little to hear Wonwoo say that.

“Sounds like you have thought about it a lot,” he mutters. He looks off into the distant blue, staring and pretending the hard discomfort in his chest wasn't there. 

There's a gentle sigh. 

“Only recently,” Wonwoo closes his eyes. It’s odd, in a nice way, how much softer he looks once the sharpness in his eyes is hidden, “I’m sorry. I know you’re like, a horrible romantic or something. I must look like an ass all the time but I’m just…”

“Confused?”

Mingyu brings his hands to the back of his head, resting on his layered palms. It’s not like he was actually mad. He doesn’t get mad at Wonwoo. It might be something like a fatal flaw of his. 

“Hm,” Wonwoo copies his pose, eyes adrift to another passing cloud, “Yeah, I guess.” 

“It's okay, by the way. You're not a real ass. As real as a butt implant.” 

Wonwoo laughs, “thanks, I guess.” 

Cat comes back from wherever she’d been lurking, paws padding along the softened dirt as he makes these strange chirping noise, jaw slightly parted open and tail upright with a happy, proud rigor. 

Wonwoo sits up as she climbs into his lap, loose grass all over her back, and Mingyu gazes up at him as he gently tries to pry the poor cricket out of her mouth with care, trying not to both offend his animal and crush the insect.

“Nothing seems to make sense, Gyu,” Cat gives in and drops the shocked, mangled cricket into Wonwoo’s palm, “Like, you think you’ve figured shit out and you’re okay with not knowing what you don’t know. But then crap happens, and you have to start all over again. Not knowing what to do.”

Mingyu's brain tick-tocks for a beat. 

“Are we still talking about soulmates?”

There’s a pause. The wind stirs. Long, dry blades of grass scratching against each other and the heat of the sun slicks down like oil. 

Something shifts across Wonwoo's face and Mingyu knows it's not a trick of light, he watches him too well, knows him too well. 

Then, Wonwoo’s handing over the still unmoving creature to him. Mingyu sits up and takes it in his open palm, watches its straw-thin legs twitch and spasm, its delicate wings flapping awkwardly. The two of them, three if he really counted the cat, which he doesn’t, watch it for a moment as it recomposes itself.

“Is it okay?”

Suddenly, it panics into life — wings beating into a buzz before it zips a distance away, dropping into the grass, out of sight and safe.  

Mingyu’s eyes don’t move from the spot until Wonwoo’s standing up beside him, arm bent behind his back to brush the grass off his shirt. Cat’s leapt on his shoulders again. They’re a complete set like this, looking down at him. Wonwoo offers his hand. 

“Let’s go somewhere else.”

Mingyu takes it. They’re cold and it feels like relief in the oppressive heat. “Where?”

A flicker of light darts across the corners of the sky. Mingyu forgets to question it when he feels fingers squeezing his.

“I’ll buy you some mangoes.”

 

For a long time, Mingyu’s known that Wonwoo doesn’t particularly like coming to the central square of their town. Even further, Wonwoo avoids going into the city as much as possible. 

As a child, it had been too apparent after their first trip there. Wonwoo had returned home with sour, foul-mouthed taste for it but refused to explain why to his parents even though he was coaxed by candies, train rides and natural history museums. 

Every school excursion permission slip since then had never left his backpack.

When Mingyu had asked why, Wonwoo told him didn’t like how  _ festering  _ it was. 

It was only as he grew older that Mingyu guesses Wonwoo realised that avoiding society, avoiding the culminating pressures of urbanization, cannot be done by one boy. Still, it takes Mingyu a whole three days of pleading to get Wonwoo to even suppose a trip. 

For now though, Mingyu’s okay with just going into the town square fruit markets and bakeries. 

The sun’s beginning to set. The blue that was before melds into of cold reds and ambers, lengthened by a tail of lilac. Their shadows fade grey yet the light that coats Wonwoo’s figure as he swings around a plastic bag of mangoes — three, one for each and Bohyuk — is a stark gold. 

They’re cutting across the parking lot to the local sushi chain run by the Wen family, Wonwoo’s cat blazing the trail ahead of them. Its black pelt is burgundy in the sunset. 

When they walk in, they’re greeted by the chime of a bell, a real one, and Junhui’s bored face morphing into that of a pleasantly surprised one.

“And to what do I owe the presence of bean pole and his fish-hating friend at my humble  _ sushi  _ shop?”

“It’s not  _ your  _ store, Jun.” 

“For the hours I have to slave here, it may as well damn be.” 

Ten minutes later Junhui’s affronted face is staring at down at Cat, who’s muzzle deep in a plastic plate of salmon and tuna, all three — four, Mingyu guesses — seated at a booth table near the front. Both him and Junhui are poking at the malformed runts of the day’s offers; sloppily wrapped rolls courtesy of Jun’s handiwork, the ones with more lettuce than prawn and under-flavoured, drying rice. Wonwoo’s content to just watch, fingers interlocked to rest his chin upon. 

“What’s with the cat?” Junhui picks up a stray caviar ball and throws it at Mingyu. 

Mingyu scowls. He picks it up off his lap, fingers getting sticky with sauce residue, “Not  _ the  _ cat.  _ Just  _ Cat.”

Junhui snorts, “Alright, what’s with  _ just  _ Cat?” 

Wonwoo hands Mingyu a napkin, “She’s been following me for three days now.”

At this, Junhui nods,  _ aah _ ing in comprehension. 

“And thus was the origin story of the crazy cat man, terminally single, terminally misanthropic.”

Wonwoo throws him a dirty look.

“Mingyu, remind me why we’re friends with him again.”

Mingyu stops scrubbing his fingers and looks up. 

“Remember when you forgot we had a calc test because you had marathon the new pokemon game and Jun let you copy off his answers? That’s why.”

Junhui doubles back with a laugh, metal chair leg screeching against the hardwood as he leans back. Mingyu’s hands are suddenly empty, Wonwoo ripping his napkins from, scrunching them and sniping them dead centre onto Junhui’s forehead. It bounces off soundlessly onto his lap. 

“Shut it, Wen.”

Junhui begins to calm, breath slowing down as he wipes his dry eyes for effect, “Can’t help it. The sweet betrayal of your lap dog.”

A furious heat spreads across Mingyu’s face and while he’s grateful Wonwoo is too busy glowering to experience the glorious sunset of his cheeks, Junhui certainly is not. He sticks his tongue out. Of course the heavens would be so kind to give Junhui the wily brains to have figured it out long ago.  

“By the way,” Wonwoo reaches over to scratch Cat’s chin, no longer mock-offended, “how’s Jihoon doing?”

Heaven, so genial, also threw in a bonus high school sweetheart into the mixture. 

It has Junhui sobering up hilariously fast.

“Good,” he clips, “Great, even. I think?”

Cat meows. 

“I mean,” Junhui shrugs until his shoulders bump into his ears, “his parents are kinda starting to get used to the fact that we, you know, turned out to be each other’s...We’re still young, that’s all.”

“What about…” Mingyu eyes Junhui’s collar, nodding at it.

He can’t help but pry, he knows it’s personal, the most personal it might ever get, but he’s rarely, rarely seen one with his own eyes and Junhui knows he can trust him. Even then, however, his friend still laughs a little nervously. He thumbs the fabric, eyes downcast to his lap. 

“It’s spreading, that’s for sure,” and he pulls it down, just a peek. 

To a distracted eye, it could be mistaken for a splattering of freckles or moles, dashed across Junhui’s collarbones. But Mingyu’s glimpsed it’s growth and he knows that further down, closer to the sternum and above the heart, as Junhui has described, is where a larger picture hides. 

Now, even just from the glimpse of skin from his shirt, it looks bigger than when Mingyu had last seen. It had started small, but now that he had found his match, it might as well have been blossoming out control. 

“Do you two know how you’ll make it work?”

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo warns, his voice half the volume it was before.

If he was uncomfortable, Junhui does a good job at masking it. His fingers fiddle with his disposable chopsticks, the cheap wood splintered at the top and the tips stained with soy sauce. 

“Jihoonie, he doesn’t really know what to make of it,” he stabs a mound of wasabi, “being friends is good, though. We’re cool with just friends.”

Mingyu wants to ask, almost asks,  _ but what about you?  _ But in his periphery he notices Wonwoo fade a bit, turning distant.

He shuts his mouth and changes the topic. 

 

They end up leaving when well after dark. The sun had left over an hour ago. It wasn’t intended, but Junhui had been especially stubborn about not being left alone again for another night on close up duty. 

He’s always alone in this corner shop, no one wants sushi at the end of a scorching, humid day. He curses the ice cream parlour across the road. 

Despite having lived here his whole life, Mingyu still finds himself on edge at the abandoned state of the parking lot. It's black-out dark, lit only by a lone flickering lamp post, the weak neon hum of a distant supermarket, and the moon. 

Junhui lives on the other side of town, the opposite direction of Mingyu and Wonwoo, and he'd thrown them each a pack of chewy candy as an apology before driving off. 

Mingyu would never forgive him, he hates green apple flavouring. 

“Swap for sour grape?” Wonwoo holds out his pack, a cartoon drawing of said fruit puckering its purple lips at him. 

Mingyu takes it and tosses his own stick of green high-fructose flavouring. He fumbles for the tiny red tab at the top and pulls, the plastic covering unravelling and the first block spilling out onto Mingyu’s palm. 

“Do you think Junhui’s happy?” he asks. 

Cat stalks ahead of them, her flank wiggling as she pounces on a fly-away piece of garbage. Mingyu watches the gradualness of Wonwoo’s smile, likens the way his eyes brighten to the way the lamppost above flickers into life with a loud hum. 

“In general?” Wonwoo replies with his teeth sinking into a chewy.

“I meant,” Mingyu puts one in his mouth as well, immediately salivating at the tart sweetness, “about his thing with Jihoon.”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“I kind of wonder what changed about them to make their marks appear,” Mingyu muses, pocketing the candy away, “Jihoon hasn’t told me shit.”

Wonwoo’s eyes drift back up to him. The lamp post sputters and fails, buzzing out like a dying fly. His eyes drift back down. 

“It’s not really our business,” he sighs, “They’ve been friends their whole lives and it only happens now? That’s, that’s got to be super awkward and shit.”

The tackiness of the candy is too much on Mingyu’s teeth and he forcefully swallows it, feeling its sugary trail on the back of his tongue. That’s right, he knows this. 

If, if everything he’d built up with Wonwoo, the cumulative efforts of his nagging, embarrassing friendship that he’s come to adore, could turn sour overnight, would the risk be worth the venture?

He scolds himself. He was getting ahead of himself again.

Yet still. Still. He doesn’t know if he can call it an ache, call it  _ yearning,  _ but it’s sitting there in the bottom of his gut. Burning up the sweetness he’d just swallowed.

“What if it happened to you? What if it was someone you know right now?”

Wonwoo stays silent, eyes on the shifting ground as they step onto the ledge of the sidewalk and off the lot. By now, Mingyu already knows he was an idiot for asking. He already knows how Wonwoo feels. 

“I don’t think,” Wonwoo speaks up, teeth nudging his bottom lip before biting down, “I don’t think I’d mind, actually. Maybe.”

Mingyu stumbles over his feet. 

His knees smash onto the pavement, his palms just catching him from planting his face onto the concrete. Stunned, the tether to his brain snaps and all that runs through his mind is  _ what the fuck  _ as he faintly registers the slow onset of pain.

“Shit, are you okay?” Wonwoo drops down beside him and places his hand on his back. Cat, even, dashes around to them in the commotion.

“Ow,” this was an all time new humiliation level reached. He shifts so that he’s balancing on his feet before lurching back to sit on his butt. The skin of his palms are only lightly grazed, nothing bad except the indents of gravel into the flesh. His knees, however, are a throbbing, angry red. 

Wonwoo sighs at the sight, “You’re such a loser.” He sounds fond. Mingyu hopes it sounds fond. 

“It’s chronic,” he brushes the debris off his hands and then, carefully, around the skin of his wounded knees, “It doesn’t hurt. I can still walk, just  _ ow.” _

Truthfully, it stings like a bitch, but even  _ more  _ truthfully? What the fuck does Wonwoo mean he won’t mind? He’s always minded, he’s being minding it since the fifth grade and now all of a sudden he wants to give Mingyu whiplash?

“Need help?”

Wonwoo’s stood up without him noticing, his right arm extended for him. Mingyu can get up just fine on his own but he’s a little obvious, even to himself, and he accepts it, laughing a bit when Wonwoo clearly struggles for a second pulling him up with his thin arms. Lenient, Mingyu takes over the rest yet once he’s upright, he doesn’t let go just yet. 

Wonwoo slows down, stilling. He glances at their hands and then at Mingyu, a brow quirked so that his handsome face was furrowed. 

For years, Mingyu’s had the easiest face to read out of the two of them and now, with a blanket of clouds rolling over the moon and that one, stupid streetlamp dying out again, it’s near impossible to read Wonwoo’s. 

It’s not so bad like this, in the near pitchness. At least Wonwoo won’t be able to see how ugly his face is turning with confusion. 

“Uhm,” he coughs into the fist of his other hand, “what did you mean back then? I always thought—”

“We need to go.”

“What?” Mingyu splutters. Wonwoo tugs at his hands, turns around to leave but no, not this, not like this again. Mingyu doesn’t budge. He tugs back and Wonwoo stumbles, “Wonwoo, you always avoid talking about this—”

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo looks at him them, sounds almost pleading, some agitated beat to the way he’s trying not to get irritated at him, “we can talk about this later. We just need to leave  _ now _ .”  

_ “Why?” _

Cat darts between his legs, a flash of shadow, tail brushing against Mingyu’s calf and the wind picks then, a chill chafing the skin of his collar and pulling along the skin of his elbow. He turns around.

He turns around and he sees. 

“What,” he breathes, “What is  _ that?” _

Something. There’s something there. Silhouetted against the bare, black sky. A mass, moving, undulating, serpentine. The air, in his mouth, his throat, his lungs turn thick and hot into wet, cloying steam and he thinks this is that kind of fear that scrapes his stomach with panic.

“Mingyu?” Wonwoo chokes, and then, suddenly recomposed, slips his hand out of his and — “It’s gone.” — grips his wrist and  _ pulls _ . This time, Mingyu follows. 

 

“Everyone’s probably asleep.” Beneath the doorside flowerpot, Mingyu fishes out the spare key, making sure he hadn’t upset his mom’s daisies before, with fumbling hands, slotting the key into its hole.

The door creaks open to the empty, black entranceway and though he knows there can’t be anything there, there shouldn’t be anything there, he finds himself hesitant to walk in. 

“Gyu,” it’s the first time Wonwoo’s spoken up since they left the car park.

Cat is back. She weaves between Mingyu’s legs again, her pelt pressed against his ankles as she enters before him. Mingyu sighs and follows her. 

The door closes with a deafening click and Wonwoo pauses at the light switches, unsure whether to risk waking the house up and bring some solace to how shaken Mingyu must look. Mingyu picks for him. 

“Let’s go,” he murmurs and leaves for the stairs without waiting. A few heartbeats later, Wonwoo’s footsteps follow.

The moment his bedroom door closes, Wonwoo flicks on the light. 

“That,” Mingyu drops down onto his mattress, “that thing. You saw it, right?” 

Wonwoo doesn’t move from the doorway. He stays there, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. 

“You saw that thing and you, you,” Mingyu exhales. He doesn’t know how to deal with this sort of shit. He runs his hands through his hair, “you were surprised. That I saw it too.”

“Mingyu, it’s not—”

“I’m not a idiot, Wonwoo. I know you, okay? I’m not as dumb as you think I am.”

Wonwoo scowls, “You’re not dumb, I didn't say that.” 

“Then you’re not denying it? Do you know what that thing was?”

There’s no response. 

Typical. It’s so typical for Wonwoo to just shut him out like this, it’s unfair, Mingyu thinks, glaring down at his lap so as to hide his glowing neon billboard of emotions. 

The mattress dips then. Mingyu glances to the side and sees Wonwoo, sitting down beside him with a heavy sigh, shoulders slumped. Their knees press together, the sight somewhat jarring when Mingyu remembers the bloody state of his. The sting returns with the memory. 

“Specifically? No,” Wonwoo begins with a fragile mumble before chuckling weakly, “I’ve never really had to explain this before,” his lips twisting into a tight frown, “I don’t understand how you could see it though, you’ve never seen them before.”

It’s a start. 

“Well,” Mingyu inspects his hand, “it disappeared when you let go of me?”

Wonwoo squints and faces him, “So, only when I’m touching you? But I touch you all the time.”

It’s the worst timing for a blush, but Mingyu’s traitorous face heats up regardless. Does Wonwoo ever listen to himself sometimes?

“Maybe just the hands? Yesterday—”

Wonwoo’s eyes widen.

“The store? So you—”

“Also, what is  _ them?  _ You said not specifically but—”  

“For crying out loud, will you both let each other talk?”

That. 

Was not them. 

A pained expression fractures Wonwoo’s face. “Cat,” he grimaces,  _ “not now.” _

“Well, it’s a little too late for that.”

Sure enough, when Mingyu finally turns his head it’s Cat, sitting prim and proper and cleaning her paws. One hundred percent feline. Except when she looks up then, head on with Mingyu and levels him with the most sentient, human-like amusement on her muzzle. 

“Okay,” Mingyu starts, “now I  _ really  _ need an explanation.”

 

+

 

There are no secrets between him and Wonwoo. But a statement like that needs agreement on both parties because Mingyu sure as hell can’t read Wonwoo’s mind as much as he thinks he can.

There are no secrets between them. Mingyu tells him everything, everything that wouldn’t irreversibly damage their friendship anyway, and there’s nothing he doesn’t bare. But maybe that’s his fault. To be too trusting, too hopeful.

He tells Wonwoo he wants a house with a big yard, two dogs and a cat, 3.5 children, red mailbox by the picket fence. Sunflowers in a pot. An oak tree with a swing. He wants to be a vet when he grows up, or wait, maybe a chef or a baker, maybe an architect. It's hard to make up his mind. He does that a lot, overthinking, overcompensating, distrusting himself to the point where he’s leech for validation. Draining. He must be so draining. Maybe he’s a bad person. What if he’s a bad person? He’s afraid people only pretend to like him, look at him, he’s big and loud and he can’t take a hint. He can’t even like himself on a good day, at best he’s a shadow on the wall. 

That’s why, he tells Wonwoo, he loves soulmates. There’s a guarantee; the universe’s safety net. Everyone loves their safety net, their blessing. 

Wonwoo tells him he wants a normal house, with a normal yard and a job that affords day-long heating throughout the winter. He wants a cat, maybe two, then maybe a turtle. He doesn’t know what he wants to be, and he guesses if, not when, he meets his soulmate, he won’t really know what to do either. Be ambivalent about at best, he guesses.

But he’s lying, Mingyu knows, ambivalence isn’t running, not the quiet distaste that fills the face.  

It’s clear Wonwoo’s just afraid, but maybe that’s not all of it. 

Mingyu thinks Wonwoo’s soulmate should feel so lucky, even if he comes with a challenge. There’s nothing about him that he doesn’t love even if he is being strangled by his presence half the time. 

If it’s not him, that dominating, unmovable chance of millions versus one, Mingyu will be happy for them. It’s the guilt of loving someone, even just a little. 

But maybe he’s lying too. 

 

+

 

“Oh fuck,” Mingyu slams the back door open, swings open all the windows and sneezes, tea towel flapping in his hands. 

“Fuuuuuuck,” he looks down at the crumbled charcoal on his tray, haphazardly tossed onto the counter. Bits of black have landed on the floor, ash amongst the debris. Rest in Pieces, snickerdoodles. Rest in fucking pieces.

“What the _ fuck,” _ he laments one more time. He vigorously rubs his hands over his face, doesn’t care that his hair is getting mussed with thick flour and skin tacky with sugar. Maybe, he’d thought, baking would take his mind off shit. It always does. 

Obviously. 

He sighs, drops the tea towel onto the bench and rips his apron off, discarding it onto a bar stool before dropping himself atop the back door steps, resting his jaw against his hands. The washing machine is on behind him, humming away.

Mingyu can’t take this, this weird  _ normalcy  _ about shit. Baking in the kitchen. Getting the laundry done. He’ll have to hang them out soon. Out in this bright, sunny, windy day. This perfect day, with thick clouds cruising a blue, blue horizon. 

Life altering news doesn’t stop for the small shit. Doesn’t stop for cookies or laundry or the fact that things with Wonwoo are different. Awkward. He’s pissed, even, that as soon as Wonwoo had shoved him the bare minimum — crap about spirit realms and portals and  _ magic spirit vision _ — had chased him out. 

They haven’t talked since. 

It’s hilarious, that a few days ago Mingyu was worried he’d make things weird between them. In the end he didn’t even have to do a thing. 

He looks down from the sky, from where the last of the smoke was dissipating, and scans across his yard.

Landscaping fanatics, Mingyu’s parents have made it look like something ripped out of a landscaping magazine. There are the orchard trees, whose branches and trunks he’d zig zagged over back when he was small and light enough to do so. Then the greenhouse, compact but bursting from the inside, glass frosted with humidity, ripe reds and yellows and deep greens fogged at the edges. 

The flowerbeds and shrubbery and desert plants that Mingyu was strictly forbidden from playing in.

The pond, where he fell in when he was six. The washing line’s getting old. The stony pathway, always weedless. 

Then there’s the fence, partitioning this space from the Jeon’s with its flaking white paint and flattened tips that had been sawed and sanded for the two of them specifically, so that they could jump over without fuss once they were tall enough. 

Everything is fine. Normal. In it’s right, designated place. But what does he know, if right now, right in front of him one of those  _ things _ was weaving its way through his mother’s azaleas, his father’s daffodils, between his own two legs? He can’t stop replaying last night in his head. The black mass, looming. 

Stupid.

“Never thought you were the brooding type.”

Mingyu nearly shrieks. 

He whirls around to see Cat just as she leaps down from the washing machine as it rumbles into the next cycle. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever fully reconcile how Cat is not really, well, a cat. 

An envoy from the spirit realm, she had said, co-existing on another plane and sent to observe the anomaly of Jeon Wonwoo. Dressed, she added with macabre, in a shell for safe, prolonged habitation in their mortal space.

“What are you doing here,” he hisses. His sister’s upstairs and whilst she’s unlikely to poke her head out of the window to watch her brother conversing with an animal, his whole system has been ramped up on nervous energy since last night.

“If you’re worried about any spirits, there are none in your home. Or garden, for that matter,” Cat’s voice is a funny mix of raspy and human, the intermittent trills, purrs or hisses that weave between her talking voice remind Mingyu of a scratchy record, “Most of them are harmless, anyway.”

“Most of them.”

She pads over to sit beside him. Her tail wraps around her paws, “You can’t say all humans are good, as much as they are evil. The same applies for us. Neutral. Somewhere inbetween.” 

“Fair enough,” he exhales through his nose. He’s supposed to be mad right now, “how is…”

“He’s fine. Just brooding.”

“I feel like I deserve to be more upset than he is.”

She trills at this, which Mingyu takes for amusement, “Like you, it is his nature to fester.”

“That’s not good,” he scuffs his shoes, looks down at the ground. There’s a few odd ants bumping around on the porch.

“You two should talk.”

Mingyu frowns, “If he needs to, then he should come to me first. There’s — There’s not really anything to say.”

“On the contrary,” if felines had eyebrows, Cat’s would definitely be quirked in challenge, “don’t you want to talk to him too? As far as I know, you’ve got some exciting news.”

“What—” On reflex, he grabs the sleeve of right arm. The skin there seems to pulse. He deflates, sighs, “how did you know?”

“Oh, come on, Mingyu,” she cocks her head to look at him sideways, “You already know I’m not a  _ real  _ cat. These whole soulmate shenanigans you humans get all worked up about are just a byproduct of our realm,” she then stands up and languidly stretches her front legs out, back arching, before dropping onto her belly, “It appeared around two in the morning, right after you fell asleep. If you wanted to know.”

No, Mingyu didn’t want to know. He doesn’t really, shouldn’t really care right now. 

He brings his knees up to press against his chest, drops his chin onto bandaged knees, feels that awful thud against his ribcage. 

“I think after now,” he mumbles, “we can’t go back. Maybe I shouldn’t have pressed him to explain, should’ve just kept my dumb mouth shut.”

“You mousebrain,” Cat’s tail wraps against his ankles, “every secret is born to expire. He’d held onto it long enough.” 

The skin on his right arm is beginning to itch. It feels sort of like the afterglow of meek sunburn, sometimes like the buzz after a red slap to the skin. Not exactly painful, just humming, patient. He tugs his sleeve down, wishing it would shut up. 

He wonders why now?

Funny, that this was what he wanted only yesterday. 

“I don’t get why he doesn’t want to talk. What does he have to be upset about? I’m the one he kept in the dark. It’s unfair,” he confesses quietly, the words slipping out with a weak air.

“There doesn’t need to be a good reason to feel bad. Humans will feel anything anytime.”

“That doesn’t help, Cat.”

She rasps then, some ugly, yowling sound. Mingyu thinks it’s meant to be laughter. She tilts her head so that her golden eyes catch his. Her whiskers twitch.

“You couldn’t be more obvious, Kim Mingyu. You of all people know how he is. Stop denying yourself and go rescue him from that hole he’s digging in his head.”

 

Resolutely, Mingyu decides to  _ not  _ talk to Wonwoo. At least, not until he hangs out the washing, rehashes his snickerdoodles attempt, and feeds Cat a slice of cake in the fridge she’d been begging for. It’s fine, she’d said, spirits don’t have blood sugar to begin with.

He decides then, whilst staring his rising clumps of dough like a watchdog, that it doesn’t matter if things were now different. First and foremost, they were each other’s best friend. 

“Oh, by the way,” Cat pads up to him, her pelt rubbing against his hip from where he was crouched. She’s a lot more friendly now, he muses, after being sugared-up, “there’s a spirit in your room right now.”

Mingyu splutters, falling on his ass, “Huh?”

“Yeah,” she wipes some leftover cream off her muzzle, “it actually appears in your room every night. Kind of creepy, even for me.”

“What, what kind of spirit is it?” he gulps. Recalls the entity from the car park.

“Oh, it’s harmless. I don’t know how to describe it well to you. Picture a hamster with wings.”

Okay. What?

“Wonwoo’s known about it this whole time, let me guess.”

“Oh yes,” she snorts, “I told him it just likes those star stickers of yours, but he’s still paranoid about it. Hardly any of us are powerful enough to have an effect on a human. At most a negligible mood swing.”

Mingyu blinks at the information, “So, theoretically, if a super powerful spirit did decide to visit, they could theoretically be harmful?”

“If they wanted to.”

“Like...even kill or maim?”

Cat looks at him.

“Again. If they wanted to,” but then she suddenly trills, hind legs winding up before leaping up onto the counter. If his mom walked in now, she’d skin him alive, “But don’t worry. He hasn’t let you near one since you were children.”

There’s no clear reason why, Mingyu’s brain is freaking out, tripping over itself in a runaway kaleidoscope of thoughts, so he can’t fathom why heat rushes to his cheeks. It’s as if someone broke the boiler room of his body and it’s nothing but steam erupting inside him. Even his neck turns flushed as he speaks.

“This is nuts.”

 

+

 

“What,” he strangles out, “are you doing here?”

Mingyu was not expecting that for a reaction. 

Wonwoo looks fine. Maybe his eyebags are a little pronounced and his hair in a state Mingyu’s only seen during exam season or after a twelve-hour stint at the controls. He’s staring unblinkingly up at him though, as if Wonwoo thought he was caught in a day dream.

Well, it’s better than getting the door slammed in his face. Shit, maybe this was a bad idea.

Cat bumps him in the ankle with her flank before waltzing her way through Wonwoo’s legs inside. What amazing moral support. His face feels overstretched with his smile. Not like this was the first time he’s had to knock on the Jeon’s door for the first time in years or anything.

“I made your favourite?”

He holds out a tupperware container, filled to the brim so that a few pieces were squished against the lid, the insides trembling with sugar and cinnamon. Yeah, okay, it wasn’t like Wonwoo didn’t know Mingyu was a stress baker. 

Wonwoo just stares at the offering. His bottom lip becomes trapped beneath his teeth and he gnaws on it as he looks up at Mingyu before sighing. He moves aside to let him in. 

“Bohyuk and my parents are out by the way. He has a soccer game.”

“Oh,” Mingyu follows him up the stairs and leaves a tentative space between them, “you usually never miss them.”

Wonwoo shrugs, “Wasn’t in the mood.”

“Okay.”

He’s doing it again. It was as if Wonwoo had these blinds over himself and he’d just shutter and hide himself out the moment he spotted something he didn’t like on the horizon. 

Once they’re in his room, Wonwoo doesn’t close his door. Mingyu slides the tupperware onto his desk before dropping himself onto the bed. He stares at Wonwoo, who’s lingering again with uncertain fidgeting fingers by his closet. Mingyu looks at him, feels himself wilt. Wonwo gives in and joins him. 

“I’m sorry, okay?” He mumbles the moment he’s sat down, “I know that’s what you wanted to hear.”

“Do you think I’m mad at you?”

“Well, what else can you be?” he scoffs, “This is a big deal, isn’t it? Especially to you.”

“Of course especially to me, you’re my best friend, you idiot.”

Mingyu could tear his hair out. Yeah, it’s a big fucking deal Wonwoo has been bottling up this crazy, scary thing for his whole fucking life. He hasn’t even told his parents or his brother, he doesn’t even know if Wonwoo had ever planned on telling anyone ever. It’s a big secret. A big, scary fucking thing. But Mingyu would have believed him, nine, ten, sixteen years old. He’s always believed him. 

And the thing is. The funny thing is, if he was in Wonwoo’s situation, he would know this. He would trust him. 

Wonwoo turns his head away, drilling holes into the wall, “I’m sorry.”

Mingyu parrots his action, watching the shadows on the floor, “What exactly are you sorry for?”

“For letting you down,” is the mumbled reply, “I know I don’t tell you the things that matter to you.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mingyu deflates, “Sometimes I’m too pushy, too. It’s not your fault, I shouldn’t have snapped. I’m just...weirded out.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches Wonwoo shaking his head, “You do it because you care. I do it because I’m selfish.”

Mingyu laughs, “You shouldn’t hide yourself if I haven’t even told you to disappear. I’m not, I’ve never judged you before. Up until eighth grade I thought you were the epitome of cool.”

Wonwoo kicks his leg out with a huff. Looking back, that really couldn’t be anywhere further from the truth. Mingyu himself was a stupid, brat whose accumulative single neuron thought nerdy Wonwoo had it all going on in life at the age of fourteen. 

Tween Wonwoo, in retrospect, was just the shorter, more quiet predecessor to the one beside him now. A bit more perpetually reading, a bit more perpetually touchy, a little more pretentious with a sharper spice of insecurity. 

“And I’m not mad at you, if that’s what you think. Okay, maybe a little from before because you kicked me out, but,” he shrugs, inhaling through his teeth. 

“I was just,” Wonwoo kicks his leg out again, face pinched and trying to summon the right words, “scared, I guess. Telling someone. Having someone else see. It makes it so much more real. I thought I was insane for the longest time, that there definitely had to be something wrong with me.”

He looks kicked like this, some street-side scrawny animal. Mingyu reaches out to touch the back of his hand. 

“When I was little it wasn’t like I could understand these things, you know? But when we started getting older, I got real scared. Paranoid. I’m not saying you like, were a happy pill or anything but,” Wonwoo finally turns around, his profile gracing Mingyu’s sight, one eye meeting his gaze, “you made things a little easier.”

Shit. Mingyu’s whole chest clenches. 

“You’re just so,” Wonwoo inhales, lips pressed tight, then exhales in an airy laugh, “I don’t know. I don’t know, Mingyu, I can’t explain it. You know I’m not good at this. I guess I felt normal with you, and if I were crazy, you weren’t going to treat me any different in the first place. But I still got scared when you found out.”

Mingyu is weak. His heart is a weak thing of thin walls and he would collapse under the weight of his own breath if he didn’t have ribs caging him together. He pulls Wonwoo into a hug. Digs his chin into his shoulder. 

Wonwoo just laughs, patting his back, “I should’ve told you sooner.”

Mingyu grumbles into the crook of his neck, “Even if you didn’t have a talking cat and magic hands, I would’ve believed you anyway. You know I’m stupid for you.”

Wonwoo laughs again but it’s weaker, more stiff this time like his throat was closing in and Mingyu feels the side of neck heating up. 

“But I get it, too,” he continues, grips Wonwoo’s shirt when he feels him tremble, “it was hard.”

His right arm is splayed out along the small of Wonwoo’s back and it feels like he’s watching through a dream. The skin there starts to tingle, a flush of heat trapped beneath the cotton of his shirt as if trying to burn itself out. 

Should he tell him? He could tell him now. When things were soft and open and the gradient of the sky made things easier to say. 

He tightens his arms, which prompts Wonwoo to gradually reciprocate. He likes that about him, how he takes his time, takes things steady with conviction and he’s so unlike Mingyu in that way. Familiar arms, slow to curl around his backside, he wonders if Wonwoo can feel his heartbeat or if he can feel his silence, if he can listen, hear the truth in the way he’s holding him. Skin, pressure and warmth. The thin material of his shirt. Fingertips pressing down, pulling closer, his chest strung tight, waiting.

Maybe right now was too soon.

 

+

 

“Okay,” Mingyu breathes out, shaking out his fingers and bouncing on his feet, “Okay, I’m ready.”

With amazing synchrony — seriously, did they practice that? — Wonwoo and Cat roll their eyes. The three of them are at the park, beneath the great oak trees and clusters of pines, away from the white glare of the sun and a distance from the empty playground. The red, yellow, blue plastic of the equipment seem to sizzle, the swings groaning with the weight of the heat. 

It’s the kind of weather Wonwoo would never be caught dead in, but Mingyu has mastered only the best of persuasion techniques: food and wheedling. 

“Oh for heaven’s sake, you’re just going to hold hands.”

Cat, either from occupational obligation or just to keep face, has joined them with as much enthusiasm as Wonwoo.  

It’s heat, Mingyu blames, it’s the heat that has his cheeks and ears pink. 

“I’m prepping to have my mind blown,  _ Cat.” _

Wonwoo’s flushed too, though Mingyu knows it’s definitely from the weather. The second the thermometer brushes a few centigrades above room temperature, that picky body of his starts protesting.

“The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can ditch.”

“You said yourself the mall was too far to walk to.”

Wonwoo digs the toe of his sneakers into the grass, “It was either walking in this heat or standing in it.”

Cicadas, ear-splittingly loud. The sunlight shooting down in feverish beams. Wonwoo wiping his brow in sweat, squinting out into the distant browning soccer fields and glistening lake, waiting for something to come along. The leaves above cast down dapples of shadows, freckling him with light. 

“Oh, there!” Mingyu’s right hand is grabbed and pulled, Wonwoo’s own pointing outwards, “Can you see it?”

“Uh,” Mingyu stomps out the flicker of panic in his chest, the pushed up sleeve of his button up was still tight around the cuff and hadn’t ridden up any further. He looks up, following Wonwoo’s finger to the skies and — 

“Oh, wow.”

There it is. Mingyu raises a hand to his brow and squints. It’s hard to describe, Mingyu finally realizes what Cat had meant, some otherworldliness similar to that malformed feeling from that night, though now out in the daylight it felt less hostile, more...enchanting. The spirit, the closest thing he can conjure up to it is a cloud-like, feathery dragon.

Some sort of formless, serpentine figure of pale white, phasing in and out with the shifting angles of sunlight. It curled like smoke, wind-light and dancing. 

“Do you know what it is? Specifically?” He tears his eyes away to look down at Cat for a moment, eyes gravitating back.

“Just a visitor. Passing through.”

Mingyu nods along. Vaguely, he wonders if it can see them. What it sees as it looks down on their small, sun-baked grasslands. 

Beside him, Wonwoo remains quiet, the grip of his fingers still strong.  

It’s an effect of the heat more than anything else, but Mingyu’s beginning to worry if the clamminess of his hands was beginning toget gross. Unfortunately, he runs hot and whilst in the Wintertime he’s delegated to a heater on legs, Summertime usually had his friends shoving him away. 

He’s all the advocate for hand holding, the committee leader if it’s with Wonwoo, but in this kind of weather even he was feeling the discomfort. 

“They tend to gravitate more to where there are a lot of people,” Wonwoo suddenly speaks up, “next time we can go to the mall.” 

“Like people energy?”

His nose crinkles up, “Yeah, like people energy.”

That same feeling appears again. The same one from yesterday when Mingyu was out on his back porch, a lukewarm soup of unease sloshing around in his gut at the complacency, the regular tick-tock of the world as it continued to spin without as much as a blink to revelations. It makes Mingyu feel small, makes him feel so ignorant.

This time, however, it’s a little different. The liquid settled, thickened and warmed to form a layer of curiosity. A sort of rich secret to spoon out. 

He watches unblinkingly as Cat dashes out from the safety of the shade, pouncing out to torment a butterfly. He’s being uncharacteristically quiet, he knows this because Wonwoo’s turned to look at him, a concern glazing over his face.

“Do you think...” Mingyu starts, “You know how Cat said that soulmates were like, two or more people’s souls united as one in the spirit world? Some shit like that?”

A snort, “Not  _ our  _ souls, Mingyu,” Wonwoo circles a finger above his chest to emphasise, “think about parallel universes. It’s our counterpart souls in  _ another  _ world that directly influences  _ ours _ .” 

“That means they’re spirits right? They could be one of these guys,” he holds his left hand out to the spiralling figure above them, “We— One of ours, half of one of us? Uh, I mean—”

Wonwoo rolls his left shoulder to get him to stop fumbling around. He’s grinning. “If I did see a spirit that was meant to be ‘half of one of us’, I wouldn’t be able to tell anyway.”

“Yeah, okay, fair enough,” maybe he should let go of him now, “I wonder what they look like, though. Do you think we’ll ever get to see? Like, do we ascend to the spirit realm eventually or do we just keep reincarnating onto this earth, forever intertwined by unexplained, spiritual phenomena? Could we classify this as magic? God...s?”

Wonwoo’s mouth opens and then closes, blinking rapidly and fumbling over his own tongue. It’s kind of cute to see his brow all twitched up and his eyes darting around flustered and spluttering. He drops his eyes to the ground, then back up. Cute.

“Uh, I don’t know — Stop staring at me like that!” Wonwoo’s cheeks suddenly flush as he shrugs, “I just see shit Mingyu, I don’t talk to them.”

“Could you, though?”

Wonwoo blinks, “Huh?”

“Have you ever tried to talk to one of them. If you can see them, they must see you, too?”

“N-no, actually. Besides Cat, I don’t think so…I was too chicken as kid to do so. Then I was stubborn about ignoring them, I guess it just no longer occurred to me.” 

Mingyu’s heart pinches. He feels bad for bringing that topic back up; he swings their hands gently, “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Wonwoo deflates a little, the hot air leaving his head and leaving behind a foggy smile on his lips. 

“Hey, we could go to the mall, if you want.”

“ _ You _ want to walk in this heat?”

He gets kicked in the shin for that. It doesn’t matter, they’re both grinning.

“Ice cream or froyo. My treat.”

Mingyu cheers. He thrusts both his arms into the air and, having refused to let go, ends up pulling Wonwoo’s with him and causing him to stumble, forcing him onto his tiptoes with a laugh. Loud and clear and ugly. Lips split open, nose scrunched tight. 

“You’re so stupid..”

“I know.”

 

“Hey, gimme one of your sour snakes.”

Thirty minutes into being safehoused within the air-conditioned, bleach-spritzed tiled cocoon of the mall, Wonwoo’s cheeks remain a faint shade of pink. The food court’s all packed up with families and gaggles of tweens, the air hanging over the area baked with the smell of frying oil and disinfectant that had Wonwoo scrunching his nose. 

So instead they’re parked on a bench. Their backs are to an arts and craft shop whilst they’re facing the scape of the main food court, camouflaged by an island bench of ferns and foliage before them. 

“You said people energy was a thing, yeah?” 

Wonwoo hums, leaning over to dig his plastic spoon into Mingyu’s yoghurt, mango and peach, combing through the fruit pieces and juice bubbles. 

“I did. And why do you like those gross juice things? They remind of me pimples.”

“Why would say that, they’re  _ good.  _ And stop, you’re making it look gross,” he whines. A protective hand intercepts Wonwoo’s excavation efforts, “I’m trying to ask you if you can see anything right now.”

Wonwoo scoffs, spoon still poised and looking like he was about to stab with it, “Uh, yeah, I can see your poor taste in toppings.”

“Uh huh, sure thing, caramel-kiwi.”

Wonwoo snorts. He yields and leans back onto the bench, returning to his own cup. His fringe is slightly dishevelled, the number of times he’d threaded his hands through the sweat-slicked dampness has made it dry funny. He’s so handsome, it really kills Mingyu. 

“And yeah, there are a few around here. Mostly smaller ones. The big ones are causing all the sauce mess.”

“And the screaming babies?” Mingyu supplies on cue to a wail. He digs around his froyo. Crap, why did Wonwoo have to compare them to pimples?

“And the screaming babies.”

“Can I see?”

“The babies?”

Mingyu huffs, “No, you idiot,” he reaches over and drops a sour snake into Wonwoo’s cup, “the spirits.”

“Oh,” Wonwoo stares at the gummy. Its sugar crystals are starting to melt into its blue, yellow gelatin flesh, “Yeah, sure.”

He shoves it into his mouth then, Mingyu giggles, and he opens his left palm upwards for him to take. It’s such a simple movement as if Wonwoo didn’t even have even a moment of hesitation. Mingyu, in turn, makes a dramatic twirl of his wrist before setting his right palm on top. If he doesn’t make a show of it, he might keel over from how nervous he feels.

Their fingers slot and Mingyu sees. 

What Wonwoo had mentioned was true. Small, odd creatures, otherworldly and vibrant and uncanny, slinking through tables, crawling on the walls and phasing right through the customers queueing up in line for fried chicken. Not once, Mingyu notices, does someone even have the slightest shiver.

There’s a massive one. A white-winged insectoid presence, some vibrant, fluffy mutation of a moth resting high up on the glass-paned wall and soaking in sunlight with a slow, metronomic twitch of its antennae.  

“Can’t believe you see this like, all the time,” he murmurs, leaning back onto the hard wood of the backrest. If it were him, there’d no way he wouldn’t burst with the secrecy or the isolation.

Wonwoo hums. He’s got his cup on his lap, there are wet droplets on his jeans from where the condensation falls, and he’s just perusing through bits of pistachio and almonds. Mingyu squeezes his hand gently. 

Wonwoo suddenly looks up, “Where did Cat go?”

“Oh. She said she wanted to, and I quote, scour the place for gullible humans with food.”

“Looks like you no longer hate her.”

Mingyu sniffs, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s sweet to have two people shamelessly vying for my attention.”

Mingyu nearly chokes. He could honestly just die right now. He covers his face with hand, angling himself away, groaning, helplessly willing the sudden influx of heat to  _ fuck off.  _

“Aw, Gyu.”

“Don’t you dare,” he hisses. He’s refusing to look but he can sense Wonwoo’s laughter, can sense the mean-spirited joy radiating off of him, feel it in the way his fingers are twitching between his. 

Wonwoo’s laughter dies down and the silence gives Mingyu courage to look up again. He lowers his hand a fraction and peers to the side. Wonwoo’s smiling at him. The kind where the curve his mouth is so slight, just nudged onto his lips in a way that makes the clarity, the fondness in his eyes loud enough to turn Mingyu’s heartbeat deaf. 

But then Wonwoo breaks their gaze as if it were nothing, eyes glazed off again and distant. It’s nothing unordinary. Those seconds that burn the surface of his skin alive with hope, fantasies, tin-hat conspiracies, are just that. Seconds. 

Mingyu glances down to where they’re still connected. 

During the Summer, Wonwoo’s usually tans a bit. It depends on how much he’s forced to go outside. In comparison to Mingyu however, who loves the sun and busies himself weekly in its bask out in the garden beds with the flowers, sunning the laundry, shepherding his sister to this tennis game and that swimming lesson, soaks its rays in like he craves them; there’s a fair few shades of contrast between them. 

He looks up, follows Wonwoo’s line of sight. 

There’s a couple there, sat on the red plastic seats of a table, both young and dressed for the heat. One in a flippy, striped dress, the other in shorts and sandals. The latter enacts a story with her hands, bright yellow nails flashing around. A beetle-like spirit runs circles around their table. 

But what’s really eye catching though, are the matching marks winding their ways from their calves, up to their thighs. One on the left, the other on the right.

On cue, Mingyu’s own buzzes. Guilt curls around his gut.

“Hey,” Mingyu finally lets go of Wonwoo’s hand, “You know what we should do?”

Wonwoo blinks at him, dazed as if he’d been staring right at the sun.

Mingyu cocks his head backwards to the store behind them. 

“We should get stickers.”

 

+

 

In his heart, Mingyu knows he'll always be a little in love with Wonwoo. It’s hard to really know, and it’s a big prediction at best, but it makes sense in some way to him, deep down.

This love was a lengthy, drawn out simmer. No sudden burst, no firecrackling cascade, not even the soaring streak before the first explosion. It just crept quietly into the light, from behind the curtain, like the shadow of a moth. 

Wonwoo appears first like the thumbprint on a glass, the faint press of his memory as a silhouette behind the window and behind the fence, the footsteps on the porch across the yard. He's the boy four desks away, the one who sits at the back during gym and the first to get glasses in their class. 

The first time they talk, the first time he makes Mingyu laugh, the first time Mingyu makes him laugh. It blurs and blends until they're touching and shoving and elbowing, pushing and pulling, teasing, comforting; jumping over the fence, jumping into a lake, jumping from one terrible idea to the next until Mingyu breaks his arm falling from a tree, Wonwoo crying in front of him for the first time and then two hours later drawing on his cast. 

It was easier to make a sour face at the notion when he was twelve, but once his brain realised it could think, it wouldn't stop. 

It crept into the light with every moment Mingyu saw his broad backside, lit by the sun, lit by his bedroom lamp, lit by the passing moment of a car as they walk home alone at night. It’s in his fingers, the way they curl around a pencil, a page, an old guitar in a firm but gentle ownership and sometimes Mingyu wonders what if that were his hand instead. Or his wrist. Or his neck. 

If this was it, if this was to be it all for his few short years as a young and stupid unaccountable force, then should he ever want it to end when now, right now, it felt like everything he knew? Everything he could ever want to know?

The loss of this, he doesn’t think he could entertain. 

The general guideline is to save oneself for fate, to close their eyes and wait, but Mingyu's never read an instruction manual in his life. Too impatient. Lost in a chase of his own predictions. 

 

+

 

“I think it’s overkill.”

Mingyu slaps the next star into the last tiny wedge of space, “Nope,” he says, “it’s  _ realistic.” _

Seated cross-legged on his mattress, Wonwoo rolls his eyes — for the fixth, sixth time, ad nauseum, But hey, who’s counting? — and collapses onto his back, head colliding with a bounce onto the duvet just a few inches from where Mingyu was standing. 

Not that he was bragging but he doesn’t even need to extend his arm full length to place all these stickers. 

Okay maybe instead of height, he was sort compromised in other factors. Like, balance. 

“This is the second time in a week you’ve injured yourself,” Wonwoo reaches up and pokes the big, ugly forming bruise on his thigh. Mingyu whines and tugs the leg of his pajama shorts down, barely covering it. 

It was obtained in an attempt to balance on his chair, the wobbly wheeled sort, that ended up with him smashing himself against his drawers.

“How are your knees?”

They’re both scabbed over at this point. They were only superficial wounds and the pale, bumpy skinned marks they left behind were itchy. Mingyu slaps the last star up, “I think I’ll live.”

He drops down the moment he's sure its stuck fast, splaying his legs out and just admiring the handiwork. 

“That hamster spirit will be happy about this.”

“You know about that?” 

“Cat told me.” She’s disappeared for the night. Somewhere off fraternising with the mortal world.

“It's creepy,” Wonwoo murmurs, “and persistent.”

“Well if you like something, shouldn't you go after it?” 

Flat on his back, one arm folded against his chest and the other splayed out onto the duvet, Wonwoo’s hair is a mess. It’s getting long, with his fringe almost brushing his eyes. The ends curl slightly with the cooling humidity. Wonwoo looks at him.

“You don’t mean that,” he says. He looks back to the stars, “I know you’d be all over talking about your soulmate if it weren’t for me being uncomfortable with it.”

Funny how it’s Wonwoo who brings it up now. 

A hollowed feeling sinks Mingyu’s stomach. Maybe then, maybe a few days ago, but now all that glittering, golden anticipation that had bubbled in his chest at the mere thought of it has been swallowed by dread. 

The truth is he isn’t ready, not like he thought it was.

He swings his legs off his bed and stands up, padding towards the light switch, needing to hide his face for a bit.

In his mind he had half-believed that it could be Wonwoo. But now that it was actually here, the actual chance of that was daunting. He needed, finally, to be realistic about it; it was a one in a hundred million. Lost among the stars. 

Would Wonwoo even grow to want him? How could a stranger want him?

His lips part a tiny sigh. 

He flicks the lights off. 

“Oh,” Wonwoo’s voice is small but in the isolation of their room, Mingyu hears it as if it were his own.

A soft glow embroiders the room. Studded, every patch of darkness consumed with pinpoints of light, clustered and humming with a shaky exhale. Mingyu blinks slowly at the sight. If he looked up and softened his vision, he might picture himself actually lost in space, perhaps drowning in an ocean. Something like that. 

But then Wonwoo sits up. His hair still all messed up and looking small in the dimness of the room. He squints at him with a bleary curve to his eyes, smiling in a gentle way that beckoned. 

“Is the hamster here?” Mingyu returns to the mattress and sits on the edge, back facing Wonwoo but turned so that their eyes could meet.

“You wanna see it?”

Their hands meets halfway. Mingyu doesn’t look, not yet, as he maneuvers himself to lay back on his bed, on top of the soft, cool sheets as he keeps their fingers interlocked. He almost presses himself against Wonwoo’s side. Instead, he drops their hands between them, just to remind himself. 

Though he couldn’t fathom at first what the hell Cat had described to him, it certainly does look like a hamster with wings.

“How are they creepy? They’re adorable. Tiny. Squishy.”

He can’t see it, but he knows Wonwoo is silently scoffing.

“Looks are the most deceptive quality about a person.”

Mingyu throws his head back with a airy laugh, jerks his elbow to dig into Wonwoo’s ribs. Wonwoo makes a disagreeable noise, kicks him in the calf. 

It’s funny, his room has always been small for his growing size, but right now he felt there to be too much space.

If it wasn’t Wonwoo then he wouldn’t even need to tell him. But if it wasn’t Wonwoo, then it wouldn’t even matter, right?

“Hey,” it comes out so softly it tastes like cotton, “I need to tell you something.”

He feels Wonwoo’s head thump against the sheets as he turns to face him, attention directed on him. Mingyu’s brain suddenly feels emptied of words, mouth left parched, and he studies the way the blue night and the half-darkness cushions Wonwoo’s face. His sharp nose, sharp jaws, sharp eyes covered in a softness that makes him think of streetlamps in the snow. Cold, but calming.

At the silence, Wonwoo releases his hand and pushes himself up, settling on an elbow to peer down at him with lightly veiled concern.

“What is it?”

Be realistic, Mingyu reminds himself. Whatever will happen, will just happen.

He lifts his right arm up, and with his left hand, pushes his sleeve down. Night air touches burning skin. 

“I got it that night,” he blinks up, whispering. The stars blink down back, “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

He braves himself. Tries so hard to dismiss the gravity that drops atop his chest as he realises now, no matter what happens, he can never unspeak his words. He turns and faces Wonwoo. 

It’s shock. A quiet, wordless shock. It doesn’t hold Wonwoo’s face in a wide-eyed disbelief nor a stony faced incomprehension. Instead, it’s something Mingyu’s never seen before. Something new, something out of place. 

Somewhere between the way his eyes bore down at his arm and the barest intake of breath, lips parting barely, Mingyu doesn’t recognise it.

“Mingyu,” it comes so out faintly, as if it had fallen out. 

He twists his arm. Even in the dimness it stands out bold. Thin lines print their way across his skin, starting from his upper arm and circling around the entire width, waterfalling both ways in twisting, writhing bands before tapering out, unfinished like a thread undone.

When Mingyu — when Wonwoo, now, traces it, his finger moves in wavelengths. 

This is his mark, Mingyu was only beginning to comprehend now. A part of his entire existence molded against him. The lines fall fluid, Wonwoo's touch like a ghost's as he followed the dipping and spreading and cinching along all the planes and muscles of him.

It was electrifying and numbing all at once, to feel his touch there. As if Wonwoo had instead splayed out his palms and pushed right against his lungs and his heart, pressed so hard that it hurt almost, in that moment, to exist. 

“It’s spread a lot.”

Mingyu places a finger to a band right in the centre of his upper arm that encircled his bicep, “It was just this one,” he flattens his hand then so as to cover it, “and it hasn’t stopped since.”

Mingyu drops his eyes. The shirt Wonwoo’s wearing, the familiar faded cotton one, has sleeves that cut off just above the elbows. 

Wonwoo laughs then. It’s different from before, now wrapped in a whispiness and wet to hear. He’s smiling down at him.

“You really did get it first,” he muses and his gaze starts to drift, hovers over his mark, “I’m happy for you, Gyu. I really, really am.”

Mingyu weakly returns the smile. It’s a damp, creased thing, like cardboard left in the rain.

“Yeah,” he exhales through his nose, “bet you’re really eating your words now, huh?” 

Wonwoo closes his eyes and falls back to the bed. Faintly, the warmth of his body touches his. 

“You bet.” 

 

+

 

It's painfully obvious why Wonwoo is avoiding him. It was like a game of the pin the tail on the donkey, except with no blindfolds and with a gun, and a donkey that was an ass that was actually Mingyu. 

The shooter, however, was debatable. 

“I had to tell him eventually,” he reasons. It's been days since Wonwoo had properly spoken to him. 

“And this was going to happen regardless,” Cat is back. She’d assured him she wasn't actually a cat, but she damn well lived up to her image with the curled up, lazed out position she had contorted herself into.

It should be near impossible to avoid your childhood best friend slash neighbour slash I-know-where-the-spare-key-is combination, but if Mingyu's learnt anything it's that Wonwoo lived and breathed impossible. 

Here he is, after all. Pouting in his backyard again, waves of half-assed animosity directed to the window of Wonwoo's empty room. 

“I keep trying to talk to him but he makes up the dumbest excuse and runs off!” 

He’s crouched by a patch of soil, poking the dirt with a stick.

“Then stop trying to talk to him.” 

Mingyu pins her with a thrown look, “Are you serious? I might as well join a martian colony and never come back then.” 

“Dramatic,” she meows.

The empath she is, Cat punctuates her next words with a yawn. “Sometimes you forget the whole point of a relationship. It’s between  _ two _ people.” 

“I'd appreciate it if you dumbed it down a little.” 

If cats could sigh, she would. 

“Stop pretending to be an idiot,” she blinks languidly at the passing of a cloud, a stream of sunlight curtaining her, “you complain and complain, but you already know what’s best.” 

Mingyu huffs and drops his head onto his knees, and continues to wait in the garden. 

 

“Uhm, hey.” 

Wonwoo returns the next day. Nothing's changed, at least on the exterior. Except maybe that little frown on his face, that same twitch of his fingers where he would tug on his sleeves over his fingers whether he's nervous or sad or uncomfortable. Except it's Summer, and Mingyu's the only one covering something to hide. 

Wonwoo's fingers twitch and he tugs down thin air. His elbows jerk. His ears turn red. 

“Hey,” Mingyu doesn't move from the doorway. 

“Can we, uh, can—” he bites his lip. A frustrated sigh. Wonwoo runs a hand down his face as he casts his head to the side, glaring down at the porch. The sun behind him is dipping low against the rosy sky like slow, dripping honey and it casts everything in brilliant, hopeless gold. 

Wonwoo tries again. 

“Do you wanna go to the creek?” 

It'll be dark real soon. On a brisk evening like this, it’ll turn real cold too, especially down by the water and in the black shade of the trees. 

But even with no mouth, Mingyu's heart speaks first and it's yes, of course. It's always like this. Wonwoo is so handsome in this light, it’s on his cheek, in his hair, down the slope of his nose; he catches it in a way that spears an ache into Mingyu. He catches him with nothing. 

“Let me get changed.” 

Wonwoo waits in the garden. 

 

The creek winds it way through a small reserve, flushed by a bank of wet grasses and shrubs. The area is barred with tall trees, pole-like and unclimbable. Small boulders shoulder around its corners, wet and slippery and hazardous to children with terrible balance. Mingyu would know. 

It's not that far from home but by the time they're nearing the water, the last of the sunlight skims the horizon and the ground they walk on turns amber. Fireflies sneak out, collecting in the air.

Mingyu sure as hell hopes he doesn't slip and die tonight.  

Wonwoo is being unusually quiet. His usual quiet is not like this, here deep among the trees and the dampness of earth, Mingyu might as well be waiting behind the barred door of a frozen meat locker. 

Wonwoo’s adamant on walking ahead, only acknowledging his existence when turning to check on his pace. It's better than nothing.

Yesterday, Mingyu might not have been able to take this. Wonwoo acting up, avoiding him, ignoring him even though he's right  _ there.  _ His temper isn't bad. It dwells more like a cloying fever just beneath the skin. But now the only thing Mingyu wants is just for things to be okay between them. 

Wonwoo stops at the top of the decline. 

“Do you want to…?” he holds his hand to him. Mingyu doesn’t know why. 

He takes it and they make their way down, the grass grazing against their skin. 

“Why are we out here?” he finally asks as soon as their shoes hit the gravel. 

It's been a long time since he's been here so late and frankly, he's a little creeped out. Even the crickets are quiet, the leaves rustle and sway and the water sings and Mingyu stares into every shadowy bed, expectant of a spirit or machete-wielding psychopath to appear. He can’t even hear the chimes.

“Sorry for dragging you out here. I just need to, uh,” Wonwoo struggles for a moment, sighs, and even though the creek is like their own backyard, he looks as lost as a child. Mingyu feels his hand getting squeezed tighter, “needed to feel relaxed.” 

“Okay,” Mingyu returns softly, squeezes back, “I'm here.” 

“Yeah,” choking on the word, Wonwoo laughs dryly, “You are.”

Mingyu waits. 

He’d been expecting it but he still startles when a spirit appears. They’re a dim, ghostly form, its long body slinking silently between the groves and back into the shadows; Mingyu watches Wonwoo watch it leave. 

This was a kind of quiet he didn’t know how to remedy. He begins a gentle sway with their hands as they watch the night fall darker. 

Wonwoo pales in this light. The clearness of the moon and the fireflies displace him, turning him from the boy he knows to this figure unmoving in the wind. His eyes remain bright, though. Dark, almost black were it not for the stars they caught.

“When Cat appeared,” Wonwoo speaks lowly, as if Mingyu was barely there, “and explained everything to me, about what soulmates actually were, I started warming up to the idea. Accepting it. It was simple. Two people who shared a soul in a world that isn’t even our own. That doesn’t have to mean anything. Friends, lovers, or something we don’t have a name for yet.”

Mingyu listens. 

“I like that. This. But knowing the truth, it made me feel like things were both so much more easier and harder. I no longer had to restrict how I felt, I wasn’t obligated to do anything with someone I might not even know. But, at the same time,” he licks his bottom lip, “at the same time, I would just burden the other person even more if I didn’t blindly fall into their arms, right? I’ve been so afraid, Mingyu. I’ve wondered for years, how could I explain to anyone, much less my soulmate, about what I’ve been seeing? Would they even believe me, would they even want me if they thought I was lying?”

Wonwoo lets go of Mingyu’s hand that so he could hold his left arm. His fingers curl around the sleeve of his shirt, tensed as if about to pull the fabric up. 

All at once, the waters of hope and dread swallow Mingyu whole.

Wonwoo’s hand moves up. 

“I guess that’s partly why I’ve always shut you down when you wanted to talk about it. I’ve been so afraid of myself that being brave never occurred to me. But I was reminded, your and my soul are shared, you’ll feel what I feel, you’ll fear what I fear. The only person who could boundlessly understand everything about me if they wanted to, is you.”

It’s the same. Almost exactly the same. 

Inked across Wonwoo’s skin are the mirror images of Mingyu’s mark. The one single band around his upper arm, just starting to snake outwards. It shakes a riot right into Mingyu's soul.

“I guess it was pretty obvious all along,” Wonwoo smiles. 

“We—” Mingyu’s breath hitches. His mind has gone white. He stumbles back a step, “we don’t have to. Be anything. If you want.” 

Wonwoo’s face, calm and smooth with a seriousness, crinkles with a gentle laugh. 

God, it’s such a bright, sweet sound. Like daylight beneath the moon. 

“Relax, Mingyu,” he takes his wrist in his hand and it’s skin to his skin, bone to his bone and Mingyu feels his pulse leap to get closer, “we can talk first.”

“Oh, okay, yeah,” Mingyu’s body is starting to blitz out, pipes bursting and hot steam ballooning inside his chest and his head, burning him from the inside, “holy  _ shit.” _

It was Wonwoo.

Mingyu shields his face. He pours his sight down to the water’s edge, staring with wild eyes as he half expects to startle awake from a dream.

The slow current rolls over the pebble bed, reflected moonlight flickers like silver fish on the surface and it’s as if nothing had been said. The wind stirs. He keeps breathing. No meteorites or asteroids or seismic collisions, no massive rift splitting beneath his feet going  _ psych! You really thought! _ The world at pace. This was meant to happen.

“This is kind of weird. Not, not in a bad way though, I mean,” The space between Wonwoo’s brows furrow as he stumbles around his words, his clever brain and wonderful tongue suddenlywobbling, “Just. Different. But I like it, I like you. You’re my, you know,” his shoulder jerks in half-shrug, “best friend.”

Mingyu’s biological functions must be fucked. Heat roars onto to his face, scouring down his neck and his chest like a fire in a field. 

“Uh,” Wonwoo’s staring at his face. His stupid, probably stop-sign, fire-engine red face that the next martian rover was going to accidentally land on, “are you okay?”

“I like you,” Mingyu’s mouth detaches itself from his control, “I’ve liked you for a really long time.”

Wonwoo just blinks at him.

Oh shit.

“So this is even weirder for me. This is weird. I don’t know. I can’t stop talking because I have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to do now and I don’t want to put any pressure on you at all so please ignore everything I just said.”

Maybe now Mingyu could become the closest neutron star in the galaxy and just collapse on himself from the sheer weight of  _ why did I just do that.  _

But Wonwoo just laughs. A small hiccup of a laugh that bubbles out of control.

“How is this funny!?” He shrieks. God, this is unattractive. 

The hand Wonwoo has around his wrist slips away and fuck, it’s instinctual he swears, Mingyu whines. He’s seriously battling between pulling him closer and kicking him right into the water. 

“You just look so, so,” Wonwoo’s nose scrunches up, his head tilted back as his laugh rings out through the trees, “you look so  _ pained.” _

Mingyu grabs Wonwoo’s arms, shaking him, “Stop, this is seriously humiliating.”

Wonwoo hiccups on a giggle, failing hard at swallowing down his laughter, “Alright, okay, I’m not. I’m not laughing anymore”

Mingyu relaxes a little. He lets go and backs away to leave some room for them to both breathe. He’s still running hot and the breeze that cuts through the air feels like a snap, cooling his brain down. Wonwoo, too calms. 

“I meant it,” Mingyu starts off again, “both of the things. I do like you. Like  _ like _ ,” ugh, he grimaces at himself, “but you don’t have to do anything about it. I’m okay with whatever you want, we don’t have to change anything at all. I’m,” he waves his hand up and down his figure, “a blank canvas.”

Something soft blankets Wonwoo’s face then. His voice becomes pillowed with an honesty, rich and raw to hear.

“It’s okay, Mingyu,” he says, “I… Honestly, I’m not really sure what I want. But, if it’s with you, I’m okay with more.”

Mingyu lets out a low breath, “You mean…?”

Wonwoo’s cheeks flush a little, “I guess? Not — nothing concrete right now. If it’s you, though, I want to give it a go. That night, when you showed me yours, I couldn't stop thinking to myself what if —  _ who _ , who could it be? I'd never thought about it like that, that you would go off and, and have someone who would know you better than I did. Know more about you than I could, someone you would choose over me and I know, I sound so selfish and entitled. Even though I've never before thought about you, you know, romantically. Explicitly. But even that, that felt wrong, deep down to me.” 

Mingyu watches him. Drinks in the quiver Wonwoo's lips do as he wraps them around the word  _ who, his  _ eyes darting to the ground as his brow frowned. 

“Then my mark appeared, and I felt like I should've known. Of course. It was funny to me, and really, stupidly scary, but also safe. If it's you, I'd try anything. I didn’t expect it to be soon, though,” he laughs, swinging a leg out to kick at nothing as he turned to stare beyond the treetops. Suddenly, he clasps a hand over his mouth and sighs, “shit, I’m so nervous.”

Mingyu’s heart is loud. It feels like a drum kick, the thick skin of the organ bruising with a sudden punch of fondness.  

“Hey,” he reaches out to touch Wonwoo’s elbow, guiding his hand back down, “it’s just me, you know?”

“That’s the whole point,” Wonwoo’s head tilts to the side, sending him a look that he could only describe as nervous, “you’re too important, Gyu. And nothing’s impossible.”

Mingyu just knew that Wonwoo was trying to trust himself, was trusting in him too, in them to not fuck it up. But Mingyu can’t see it and maybe he’s too swollen with hope and happiness, burning him electric brave in the small hum filling him to his fingers, but he can’t see a future where they don’t stick it through together. Whatever they are then. Whatever they will be inbetween. 

“We’ll go slow,” he says, “I’m good with slow. Obviously. You’re here and all.”

Wonwoo smiles at him. He moves his arm so that Mingyu’s hand slides into his. 

“I’m warning you, I’m like a fucking mess, Gyu. My brain is scrambled and shit and,” he inhales, “and I’m sort of scared.”

“Well, since I’m a tall, hot mess too, I think we cancel each other out nicely.”

That earns him a nose scrunch, “Yeah. I’m glad it’s you.”

That gets a little heart-skip from him. 

“Geez,” Mingyu huffs, “and who bullied me about being a greasy romantic all these years?”

“You have a strong influence.”

“Ten seconds ago you were so sappy, is my lucky break already over?”

“Have you ever thought about kissing me?”

Mingyu blanches, “Huh—!?”

“You said you’ve like me for a long time,” Christ, Mingyu wonders why his mouth is so big, “Well, you must have thought about kissing me at least once.”

Mingyu whips around and starts to storm off. Wonwoo immediately grabs him, grounding him and laughing as he kept trying to pull away.

“You’re so full of yourself why would I want to kiss your stupid face!?”

“So what made you like me if not for my subpar looks? My dazzling charm? My stupendous intellect?”

This must be new world record. Ten minutes in and Mingyu already wants to kill his soulmate.

He groans, expression contorted to pain and still trying to pull away. Wonwoo maintains his valiant effort, fighting both his laughter and his strength as he resorts to using both his arms to keep him from fleeing. 

“Why,” Mingyu huffs, “do you want to know?”

“Curious,” Wonwoo puts it plainly. Mingyu finally gives in with a groan, their arms going lax with Wonwoo’s triumphant, slightly breathless smile. 

“Well,” Mingyu starts, eyes to the ground and ants crawling along his neck, “why does anyone love anyone? It’s, it’s not one small thing or even a big thing, like being kind or smart or whatever. Loving anyone, it’s like, everything gets to you. Everything becomes the reason why. You’ve been my best friend my whole life and I don’t need a reason. Haven't for a long time.”

Mingyu sneaks a look at Wonwoo’s expression. It’s serene, blank, and it churns Mingyu’s brain with anxiety. 

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” he flushes, “and your looks aren’t subpar. They’re like, overpar.”

Wonwoo struggles to meet Mingyu’s eyes, all that hot gas from before deflating out of him. 

God, they’re clueless, Mingyu laughs to himself.

“You can kiss me, if you want.”

Mingyu maybe just died. 

“What.” 

Wonwoo reddens, “We might as well try it now,” he shrugs. 

Just when Mingyu thought he'd gotten himself together, Wonwoo has to go again and trip him up, kick all the wires of his brains out of their sockets into a mess. 

“Like, on the lips?” 

“Where else do you think!”

“I don't know how you want me to answer that!” 

Wonwoo's practically scarlet now and, and — It's nice. Not only is it great that Mingyu's not the one running around like a headless goose, but Wonwoo just looks nice. All flustered. It’s a rare, wonderful look. 

“Just. Come here,” Wonwoo grumbles. 

Feeling calmer and antsier at the same time, Mingyu does. 

They’re standing in front of each other and it’s hilarious that it’s only now that awkwardness begin to settle between them.

“So,” clearing his throat, Wonwoo looks him straight in the eyes, “how do you… wanna do this?”

Mingyu tries to lighten the mood, “I figure the mechanics are we smash our mouths together.” 

“Mingyu, I’m trying to be ser—”

He cups his face with his hands. Immediately, Wonwoo tenses up, the smallest hitch of breath catching him short. 

“Don’t take it so seriously. Just think of it as our mouths touching.”

“To tell you the truth that just puts me off.”

Mingyu giggles, “Whatever gets you going.”

Probably accepting the layer of stupidity he was going to coat everything in, Wonwoo relents with a scowl, Mingyu feeling his cheeks bunching up in his palms, “Fine. Okay. Just do it, just get it over with. Ripping off a bandaid. ”

He seriously wants to laugh again but it’s unlikely Wonwoo was going to be that jazzed up about it, Mingyu thinks, taking in the rigidity of his posture. 

It’s funny. Whenever Mingyu had pictured this situation, because yeah, admittedly he has maybe daydreamed it once or twice, he thought he’d be the nervous buffoon here.

Funny. 

He begins to lean in, and everything becomes swallowed in honey. Slowed with every sticky detail. How Wonwoo’s eyes flare open a little larger, the twitch of his lips pursing with a fraction shock, bewildered that oh, okay, it’s happening, it’s really happening. Their noses almost brush, the wind picks up, and Wonwoo’s eyes squeeze shut as if he was about to get jabbed with a needle.

Mingyu thumps their foreheads together. 

“Ow!” 

Wonwoo blinks rapidly, starred with confusion. 

“What did you do that for?” he breathes.

“Wonwoo,” Mingyu’s lips round around his name and it’s cold water, dousing Wonwoo still, “relax.”

For just a fraction, Wonwoo’s mouth parts open, to object or reply Mingyu never discovers because he shuts it, and for the first time in a long while, he looks meek as he nods, trusting, and slips his eyes closed one more time. 

Gentle. It’s the gentlest thing Mingyu has ever done. His hands cradling Wonwoo’s jaw lax as he leans back, barely, and blinks once at the soft sight right in front of him, before dipping down to press their lips together in the lightest touch. 

His heart, he feels it waver, strung on red rope, lulled by night wind. 

Wonwoo’s lips are slightly chapped but they’re soft and so indescribably foreign yet familiar. It’s the latch clicking open to a door, to a box, to a lock, and the discovery of touch settling so quietly, as if it had been waiting at home this whole time. 

He moves back. Feels the tiniest breath against his lips before he straightens back up, letting go of Wonwoo and watching with slow unfolding as he opens his eyes, blinking with the colourless awe of a newborn as the world refocused. 

“Well?”

Wonwoo steps back. A hand shoots up to cover his face, attempting to mask the onset of red flooding in. 

“It was alright.”

 

“You never explained to me,” They're walking home, hand in hand, Mingyu swinging their arms together and basking in the weightlessness of the moment, “why I could suddenly see the spirits.” 

“Oh, uh,” It hasn't been an hour even, but Wonwoo's become a shade shyer. It’s kind of cute, honestly, “it's sort of simple actually. It’s because we’re connected. Like a cable.”

Wonwoo winces. Mingyu bursts out laughing.  

“Okay. How come I'd never been able to see before?” 

“Because I was a repressive piece of shit.” 

“Wonwoo,” he pouts. 

Wonwoo laughs, “No, I meant. I don’t know, these things are a mystery even to me. Like how only, what, five percent of the ocean has been explored? I barely know anything.”

“Boy, do I know that feeling.”

Wonwoo laughs. Mingyu feels proud. He deserves a trophy, a plaque, a master’s degree in the field. 

Shoulders knocking shoulders, the press of Wonwoo’s cold arms against his own shouldn’t have so much control over his emotions. They round the bend of the block and the leaves that overhang the Jeon’s garden fence brush their heads as they make their way home. 

At the front door, Wonwoo fishes the key from beneath a pot of ferns, careful not to disturb. He shakes it dry and unlocks the door. The width it cracks open spills a warm golden light onto them and like a dream, thumbs away the cold, smoothens the shadows from Wonwoo’s face. 

“Told her not to leave the light on,” Wonwoo mumbles as he slides his shoes off.

Mingyu hums softly. The hours were catching up to him and he blinked slowly, eyelids drizzled sticky with sleep. 

He grabs the sleeve of Wonwoo’s shirt and softly tugs, “Let’s go to bed.”

Wonwoo sends him a sidelong glance, a barely there tinge of red on his warm skin. He nods.

Fuck this, Mingyu thinks. This is so unfair.

How long has it been? Years maybe, all his feelings sprinting in circles, slamming against the concrete until this point where they could finally trip over into this running, trickling mess falling all the way from his heart and head, dripping to the fingertips. 

Not now. Maybe not even for a long time. But he’ll tell this stupid boy everything he feels, how much he loves. 

And maybe Wonwoo already knows, must feel it from him, from the point where their skin touches, because his ears turn scarlet under Mingyu’s gaze.

He laughs, and Wonwoo smiles back.    

That small, buzzing feeling returns. Vibrant, blossoming. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> its me again, if anyone remembers me that is...its been a while hhhhh
> 
> ive been jumping around wips and some are pulling through and some are not, so i decided to dust off this old fic and post it. i wrote this way back last year so it might read a little different and be a little messy, hopefully it’s still worthwhile! also i want to give huuuuuge colossal thank you to everyone who commented on my prev fic i adore every message i get :”-(


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